[ Mark Fisher] Ghosts Of My Life Writings On Depre( Book ZZ.org)

WRITINGS ON DEPRESSION,

HAUNTOLOGY AND
LOST FUTURES

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING ABOUT

GHOSTS OF MY LIFE

After the brilliance of Capitalist Realism, Ghosts Of My Life confirms Mark
Fisher’s role as our greatest and most trusted navigator of these times
out of joint, through all their frissons and ruptures, among all their
apparitions and spectres, past, present and future.

David Peace, author of the Red Riding Quartet and Red or Dead

Mark Fisher reads the contemporary world like no other analyst of its
miseries and madness and mores. He is driven by anger but,
miraculously, he never forgets to celebrate, when that reaction is
apposite. I find his work exhilarating, fascinating, deeply engaging and,
not least, utterly vital; this world we have made for ourselves would be a
lesser place without it.

Niall Griffiths, author of Sheepshagger

Ghosts Of My Life confirms that Mark Fisher is our most penetrating
explorer of the connections between pop culture, politics, and personal
life under the affective regime of digital capitalism. The most admirable
qualities of Fisher’s work are its lucidity, reflecting the urgency of his
commitment to communicating ideas; his high expectations of popular
art’s power to challenge, enlighten, and heal; and his adamant refusal to
settle for less.

Simon Reynolds, author of Retromania and Rip It Up and Start Again

A must read for modernists, and for anyone who misses the future. This
is the first book to really make sense of the fog of ideas that have been
tagged as “hauntology”. Ghosts Of My Life is enjoyable, progressive and
exciting.

Bob Stanley, author of Yeah Yeah Yeah: The Story of Modem Pop and
member of Saint Etienne

Praise for Capitalist Realism

‘Let’s not beat around the bush: Fisher’s compulsively readable book is
simply the best diagnosis of our predicament that we have! Through
examples from daily life and popular culture, but without sacrificing
theoretical stringency, he provides a ruthless portrait of our ideological
misery. Although the book is written from a radically Left perspective,
Fisher offers no easy solutions. Capitalist Realism is a sobering call for
patient theoretical and political work. It enables us to breathe freely in
our sticky atmosphere.’

Slavoj Zizek

‘What happened to our future? Mark Fisher is a master cultural
diagnostician, and in Capitalist Realism he surveys the symptoms of our
current cultural malaise. We live in a world in which we have been told,
again and again, that There Is No Alternative. The harsh demands of the
‘just-in-time’ marketplace have drained us of all hope and all belief.
Living in an endless Eternal Now, we no longer seem able to imagine a
future that might be different from the present. This book offers a
brilliant analysis of the pervasive cynicism in which we seem to be
mired, and even holds out the prospect of an antidote.’

Steven Shaviro

‘Finally, an analysis of contemporary capitalism that combines rigorous
cultural analysis with unflinching political critique. Illustrating the
deleterious effects of “business ontology” on education and “market
Stalinism” in public life, Fisher lays bare the new cultural logic of
capital. A provocative and necessary read, especially for anyone wanting
to talk seriously about the politics of education today.’

Sarah Amsler

Ghosts Of
My Life

Writings on Depression, Hauntology
and Lost Futures

Mark Fisher

Winchester, UK
Washington, USA

First published by Zero Books, 2014

Zero Books is an imprint of John Hunt Publishing Ltd., Laurel House, Station Approach,

Alresford, Hants, S024 9JH, UK
officel@jhpbooks.net
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For distributor details and how to order please visit the ‘Ordering’ section on our website.

Text copyright: Mark Fisher 2013
ISBN: 978 1 78099 226 6

Ah rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book
may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publishers.

The rights of Mark Fisher as author have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright,

Designs and Patents Act 1988.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Design: Stuart Davies
Cover photograph by Chris Heppell
Illustrations by Laura Oldfield Ford

Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CRO 4YY

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CONTENTS

00: Lost Futures

‘The Slow Cancellation of the Future’

Ghosts Of My Life

01: The Return of the 70s

No Longer the Pleasures: Joy Division
Smiley’s Game: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

The Past is an Alien Planet: The First and Last Episodes of Life on Mars
‘Can the World be as Sad as it Seems?’: David Peace and his Adapters
Now Then, Now Then: Jimmy Savile and ‘the 70s on Trial’

02: Hauntology

London After the Rave: Burial
Downcast Angel: Interview with Burial

Sleevenotes for The Caretaker’s Theoretically Pure Anterograde Amnesia
Memory Disorder: Interview with The Caretaker
Home is where the Haunt Is: The Shining’s Hauntology
Hauntological Blues: Little Axe

Nostalgia for Modernism: The Focus Group and Belbury Poly
The Ache of Nostalgia: The Advisory Circle

Someone Else’s Memories: Asher, Philip Jeck, Black To Comm, G.E.S.,
Position Normal, Mordant Music

‘Old Sunlight From Other Times and Other Lives’: John Foxx’s Tiny
Colour Movies

Electricity and Ghosts: Interview with John Foxx

Another Grey World: Darkstar, James Blake, Kanye West, Drake and
‘Party Hauntology’

03: The Stain of Place

‘Always Yearning For The Time That Just Eluded Us’ - Introduction to
Laura Oldfield Ford’s Savage Messiah
Nomadalgia: The Junior Boys’ So This is Goodbye
Grey Area: Chris Petit’s Content
Postmodern Antiques: Patience (After Sebald)

The Lost Unconscious: Christopher Nolan’s Inception
Handsworth Songs and the English Riots

‘Tremors of an Imperceptible Future’: Patrick Keiller’s Robinson in Ruins

For my wife, Zoe and my son, George

Mark Fisher is the author of Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?
(ZerO, 2009). His writing has appeared in many publications, including
Sight & Sound, The Wire, The Guardian, Film Quarterly and frieze. He is
Programme Leader of the MA in Aural and Visual Cultures at
Goldsmiths, University of London, and a lecturer at the University of
East London. He lives in Suffolk.

Acknowledgements

Many of the ideas in Ghosts Of My Life were first auditioned on my blog,
k-punk. I’m grateful to the k-punk readers who responded to the ideas
there and helped them to propagate. I’m also grateful to the publishers
who kindly allowed me to reprint material in Ghosts, in particular Rob
Winter at Sight & Sound and Tony Herrington at The Wire. Some of the
pieces that originally appeared elsewhere have been altered for inclusion
here. Needless to say, all responsibility for the edits in Ghosts lies with
me.

If I were to list everyone who inspired or supported the writing of
Ghosts Of My Life, the book would never get started, so I will concentrate
only on those who worked closely on the manuscript. Thanks, therefore,
to Tariq Goddard for his patience, Liam Sprod and Alex Niven for their
attentive copy-editing and proofreading, Laura Oldfield Ford for
allowing me to use her drawings to illustrate the text, Chris Heppell for
the cover photograph, and Rob White for his customarily insightful and
incisive comments.

Lately I’ve been feeling like Guy Pearce in

Memento

-Drake

00: LOST FUTURES

‘The Slow Cancellation of the Future’

‘ There’s no time here, not any more’

The final image of the British television series Sapphire and Steel
seemed designed to haunt the adolescent mind. The two lead characters,
played by Joanna Lumley and David McCallum, find themselves in what
seems to be a 1940s roadside cafe. The radio is playing a simulation of
Glenn Miller-style smooth Big Band jazz. Another couple, a man and a
woman dressed in 1940s clothes, are sitting at an adjacent table. The
woman rises, saying: ‘This is the trap. This is nowhere, and it’s forever.’
She and her companion then disappear, leaving spectral outlines, then
nothingness. Sapphire and Steel panic. They rifle through the few objects
in the cafe, looking for something they can use to escape. There is
nothing, and when they pull back the curtains, there is only a black
starry void beyond the window. The cafe, it seems, is some kind of
capsule floating in deep space.

Watching this extraordinary final sequence now, the juxtaposition of
the cafe with the cosmos is likely to put in mind some combination of
Edward Hopper and Rene Magritte. Neither of those references were
available to me at the time; in fact, when I later encountered Hopper and
Magritte, I no doubt thought of Sapphire and Steel. It was August 1982
and I had just turned 15 years old. It would be more than 20 years later
before I would see these images again. By then, thanks to VHS, DVD and
YouTube, it seemed that practically everything was available for re¬
watching. In conditions of digital recall, loss is itself lost.

The passage of 30 years has only made the series appear even stranger
than it did at the time. This was science fiction with none of the
traditional trappings of the genre, no spaceships, no ray guns, no
anthropomorphic foes: only the unraveling fabric of the corridor of time,
along which malevolent entities would crawl, exploiting and expanding
gaps and fissures in temporal continuity. All we knew about Sapphire
and Steel was that they were ‘detectives’ of a peculiar kind, probably not
human, sent from a mysterious ‘agency’ to repair these breaks in time.

‘The basis of Sapphire and Steel,’ the series’s creator P. J. Hammond
explained, ‘came from my desire to write a detective story, into which I
wanted to incorporate Time. I’ve always been interested in Time,
particularly the ideas of J. B. Priestley and H. G. Wells, but I wanted to
take a different approach to the subject. So instead of having them go
backwards and forwards in Time, it was about Time breaking in, and
having set the precedent I realised the potential that it offered with two
people whose job it was to stop the break-ins.’ (Steve O’Brien, ‘The Story
Behind Sapphire & Steel’, The Fan Can,
http://www.thefancan.com/fancandy/features/tvfeatures/steel.html)

Hammond had previously worked as a writer on police dramas such as
The Gentle Touch and Hunter’s Walk and on children’s fantasy shows like
Ace of Wands and Dramarama. With Sapphire and Steel, he attained a kind
of auteurship that he would never manage to repeat. The conditions for
this kind of visionary public broadcasting would disappear during the
1980s, as the British media became taken over by what another
television auteur, Dennis Potter, would call the ‘occupying powers’ of
neoliberalism. The result of that occupation is that it is now hard to
believe that such a programme could ever have been transmitted on
prime-time television, still less on what was then Britain’s sole
commercial network, ITV. There were only three television channels in
Britain then: BBC1, BBC2 and ITV; Channel 4 would make its first
broadcast only a few months later.

By comparison with the expectations created by Star Wars, Sapphire
and Steel came off as very cheap and cheerful. Even in 1982, the chroma¬
key special effects looked unconvincing. The fact that the stage sets were
minimal, and the cast small (most of the ‘assignments’ only featured
Lumley and McCallum and a couple of others), gave the impression of a
theatre production. Yet there was none of the homeliness of kitchen sink
naturalism; Sapphire and Steel had more in common with the enigmatic
oppressiveness of Harold Pinter, whose plays were frequently broadcast
on BBC television during the 1970s.

A number of things about the series are particularly striking from the
perspective of the 21st century. The first is its absolute refusal to ‘meet
the audience halfway’ in the way that we’ve come to expect. This is
partly a conceptual matter: Sapphire and Steel was cryptic, its stories and
its world never fully disclosed, still less explained. The series was much

closer to something like the BBC’s adaptation of John Le Carre’s Smiley
novels - Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy had been broadcast in 1979; its sequel
Smiley’s People would begin transmission a month after Sapphire and Steel
ended - than it was to Star Wars. It was also a question of emotional
tenor: the series and its two lead characters are lacking in the warmth
and wisecracking humour that is now so much a taken-for-granted
feature of entertainment media. McCallum’s Steel had a technician’s
indifference towards the lives in which he became reluctantly enmeshed;
although he never loses his sense of duty, he is testy and impatient,
frequently exasperated by the way humans ‘clutter their lives’. If
Lumley’s Sapphire appeared more sympathetic, there was always the
suspicion that her apparent affection towards humans was something
like an owner’s benign fascination for her pets. The emotional austerity
that had characterised the series from the start assumes a more explicitly
pessimistic quality in this final assignment. The Le Carre parallels are
reinforced by the strong suspicion that, just as in Tinker Tailor Soldier
Spy, the lead characters have been betrayed by their own side.

Then there was Cyril Ornadel’s incidental music. As Nick Edwards
explained in a 2009 blog post, this was ‘[ajrranged for a small ensemble
of musicians (predominantly woodwind) with liberal use of electronic
treatments (ring modulation, echo/delay) to intensify the drama and
suggestion of horror, Ornadel’s cues are far more powerfully chilling and
evocative than anything you’re likely hear in the mainstream media
today.’ (‘Sapphire and Steel’,

gutterbreakz.blogspot.co.uk/2009/05/sapphire-steel.html)

One aim of Sapphire and Steel was to transpose ghost stories out of the
Victorian context and into contemporary places, the still inhabited or the
recently abandoned. In the final assignment, Sapphire and Steel arrive at
a small service station. Corporate logos - Access, 7 Up, Castrol GTX, LV -
are pasted on the windows and the walls of the garage and the adjoining
cafe. This ‘halfway place’ is a prototype version of what the
anthropologist Marc Auge will call in a 1995 book of the same title,
‘non-places’ - the generic zones of transit (retail parks, airports) which
will come to increasingly dominate the spaces of late capitalism. In
truth, the modest service station in Sapphire and Steel is quaintly
idiosyncratic compared to the cloned generic monoliths which will
proliferate besides motorways over the coming 30 years.

The problem that Sapphire and Steel have come to solve is, as ever, to
do with time. At the service station, there is temporal bleed-through
from earlier periods: images and figures from 1925 and 1948 keep
appearing, so that, as Sapphire and Steel’s colleague Silver puts it ‘time
just got mixed, jumbled up, together, making no sort of sense’.
Anachronism, the slippage of discrete time periods into one another, was
throughout the series the major symptom of time breaking down. In one
of the earlier assignments, Steel complains that these temporal
anomalies are triggered by human beings’ predilection for the mixing of
artefacts from different eras. In this final assignment, the anachronism
has led to stasis: time has stopped. The service station is in ‘a pocket, a
vacuum’. There’s ‘still traffic, but it’s not going anywhere’: the sound of
cars is locked into a looped drone. Silver says, ‘there is no time here, not
any more’. It’s as if the whole scenario is a literalisation of the lines in
Pinter’s No Man’s Land: ‘No man’s land, which never moves, which never
changes, which never grows older, which remains forever icy and silent.’
Hammond said that he had not necessarily intended the series to end
there. He had thought that it would be rested, to return at some point in
the future. There would be no return - at least, not on network
television. In 2004, Sapphire and Steel would come back for a series of
audio adventures; though Hammond, McCallum and Lumley were not
involved, and by then the audience was not the television-viewing
public, but the kind of special interest niche easily catered for in digital
culture. Eternally suspended, never to be freed, their plight - and indeed
their provenance - never to be fully explained, Sapphire and Steel’s
internment in this cafe from nowhere is prophetic for a general
condition: in which life continues, but time has somehow stopped.

The slow cancellation of the future

It is the contention of this book that 21st-century culture is marked by
the same anachronism and inertia which afflicted Sapphire and Steel in
their final adventure. But this stasis has been buried, interred behind a
superficial frenzy of ‘newness’, of perpetual movement. The ‘jumbling up
of time’, the montaging of earlier eras, has ceased to be worthy of
comment; it is now so prevalent that is no longer even noticed.

In his book After The Future, Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi refers to the ‘the

slow cancellation of the future [that] got underway in the 1970s and
1980s.’ ‘But when I say “future”’, he elaborates,

I am not referring to the direction of time. I am thinking, rather, of the
psychological perception, which emerged in the cultural situation of
progressive modernity, the cultural expectations that were fabricated
during the long period of modern civilization, reaching a peak after
the Second World War. These expectations were shaped in the
conceptual frameworks of an ever progressing development, albeit
through different methodologies: the Hegel-Marxist mythology of
Aufhebung and founding of the new totality of Communism; the
bourgeois mythology of a linear development of welfare and
democracy; the technocratic mythology of the all-encom-passing
power of scientific knowledge; and so on.

My generation grew up at the peak of this mythological
temporalization, and it is very difficult, maybe impossible, to get rid of
it, and look at reality without this kind of temporal lens. I’ll never be
able to live in accordance with the new reality, no matter how
evident, unmistakable, or even dazzling its social planetary trends.
(After The Future, AK Books, 2011, ppl8-19)

Bifo is a generation older than me, but he and I are on the same side of a
temporal split here. I, too, will never be able to adjust to the paradoxes
of this new situation. The immediate temptation here is to fit what I’m
saying into a wearily familiar narrative: it is a matter of the old failing to
come to terms with the new, saying it was better in their day. Yet it is
just this picture - with its assumption that the young are automatically
at the leading edge of cultural change - that is now out of date.

Rather than the old recoiling from the ‘new’ in fear and
incomprehension, those whose expectations were formed in an earlier
era are more likely to be startled by the sheer persistence of recognisable
forms. Nowhere is this clearer than in popular music culture. It was
through the mutations of popular music that many of those of us who
grew up in the 1960s, 70s and 80s learned to measure the passage of
cultural time. But faced with 21st-century music, it is the very sense of
future shock which has disappeared. This is quickly established by

performing a simple thought experiment. Imagine any record released in
the past couple of years being beamed back in time to, say, 1995 and
played on the radio. It’s hard to think that it will produce any jolt in the
listeners. On the contrary, what would be likely to shock our 1995
audience would be the very recognisability of the sounds: would music
really have changed so little in the next 17 years? Contrast this with the
rapid turnover of styles between the 1960s and the 90s: play a jungle
record from 1993 to someone in 1989 and it would have sounded like
something so new that it would have challenged them to rethink what
music was, or could be. While 20th-century experimental culture was
seized by a recombinatorial delirium, which made it feel as if newness
was infinitely available, the 21st century is oppressed by a crushing
sense of finitude and exhaustion. It doesn’t feel like the future. Or,
alternatively, it doesn’t feel as if the 21st century has started yet. We
remain trapped in the 20th century, just as Sapphire and Steel were
incarcerated in their roadside cafe.

The slow cancellation of the future has been accompanied by a
deflation of expectations. There can be few who believe that in the
coming year a record as great as, say, the Stooges’ Funhouse or Sly
Stone’s There’s a Riot Goin’ On will be released. Still less do we expect the
kind of ruptures brought about by The Beatles or disco. The feeling of
belatedness, of living after the gold rush, is as omnipresent as it is
disavowed. Compare the fallow terrain of the current moment with the
fecundity of previous periods and you will quickly be accused of
‘nostalgia’. But the reliance of current artists on styles that were
established long ago suggests that the current moment is in the grip of a
formal nostalgia, of which more shortly.

It is not that nothing happened in the period when the slow
cancellation of the future set in. On the contrary, those 30 years have
been a time of massive, traumatic change. In the UK, the election of
Margaret Thatcher had brought to an end the uneasy compromises of the
so-called postwar social consensus. Thatcher’s neoliberal programme in
politics was reinforced by a transnational restructuring of the capitalist
economy. The shift into so-called Post-Fordism - with globalisation,
ubiquitous computerisation and the casualisation of labour - resulted in
a complete transformation in the way that work and leisure were
organised. In the last 10 to 15 years, meanwhile, the internet and mobile

telecommunications technology have altered the texture of everyday
experience beyond all recognition. Yet, perhaps because of all this,
there’s an increasing sense that culture has lost the ability to grasp and
articulate the present. Or it could be that, in one very important sense,
there is no present to grasp and articulate any more.

Consider the fate of the concept of ‘futuristic’ music. The ‘futuristic’ in
music has long since ceased to refer to any future that we expect to be
different; it has become an established style, much like a particular
typographical font. Invited to think of the futuristic, we will still come
up with something like the music of Kraftwerk, even though this is now
as antique as Glenn Miller’s big band jazz was when the German group
began experimenting with synthesizers in the early 1970s.

Where is the 21st-century equivalent of Kraftwerk? If Kraftwerk’s
music came out of a casual intolerance of the already-established, then
the present moment is marked by its extraordinary accommodation
towards the past. More than that, the very distinction between past and
present is breaking down. In 1981, the 1960s seemed much further away
than they do today. Since then, cultural time has folded back on itself,
and the impression of linear development has given way to a strange
simultaneity.

Two examples will suffice to introduce this peculiar temporality.
When I first saw the video for the Arctic Monkeys’ 2005 single ‘I Bet You
Look Good on the Dancefloor’, I genuinely believed that it was some lost
artifact from circa 1980. Everything in the video - the lighting, the
haircuts, the clothes - had been assembled to give the impression that
this was a performance on BBC2’s ‘serious rock show’ The Old Grey
Whisde Test Furthermore, there was no discordance between the look
and the sound. At least to a casual listen, this could quite easily have
been a postpunk group from the early 1980s. Certainly, if one performs a
version of the thought experiment I described above, it’s easy to imagine
‘I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor’ being broadcast on The Old
Grey Whisde Test in 1980, and producing no sense of disorientation in
the audience. Like me, they might have imagined that the references to
‘1984’ in the lyrics referred to the future.

There ought to be something astonishing about this. Count back 25
years from 1980, and you are at the beginning of rock and roll. A record
that sounded like Buddy Holly or Elvis in 1980 would have sounded out

of time. Of course, such records were released in 1980, but they were
marketed as retro. If the Arctic Monkeys weren’t positioned as a ‘retro’
group, it is partly because, by 2005, there was no ‘now’ with which to
contrast their retrospection. In the 1990s, it was possible to hold
something like Britpop revivalism to account by comparing it to the
experimentalism happening on the UK dance underground or in US R&B.
By 2005, the rates of innovation in both these areas had enormously
slackened. UK dance music remains much more vibrant than rock, but
the changes that happen there are tiny, incremental, and detectable
largely only by initiates - there is none of the dislocation of sensation
that you heard in the shift from Rave to Jungle and from Jungle to
Garage in the 1990s. As I write this, one of the dominant sounds in pop
(the globalised club music that has supplanted R&B) resembles nothing
more than Eurotrance, a particularly bland European 1990s cocktail
made from some of the most flavourless components of House and
Techno.

Second example. I first heard Amy Winehouse’s version of ‘Valerie’
while walking through a shopping mall, perhaps the perfect venue for
consuming it. Up until then, I had believed that ‘Valerie’ was first
recorded by indie plodders the Zutons. But, for a moment, the record’s
antiqued 1960s soul sound and the vocal (which on a casual listen I
didn’t at first recognise as Winehouse) made me temporarily revise this
belief: surely the Zutons’ version of the track was a cover of this
apparently ‘older’ track, which I had not heard until now? Naturally, it
didn’t take me long to realise that the ‘60s soul sound’ was actually a
simulation; this was indeed a cover of the Zutons’ track, done in the
souped-up retro style in which the record’s producer, Mark Ronson, has
specialised.

Ronson’s productions might have been designed to illustrate what
Fredric Jameson called the ‘nostalgia mode’. Jameson identifies this
tendency in his remarkably prescient writings on postmodernism,
beginning in the 1980s. What makes ‘Valerie’ and the Arctic Monkeys
typical of postmodern retro is the way in which they perform
anachronism. While they are sufficiently ‘historical-sounding to pass on
first listen as belonging to the period which they ape - there is
something not quite right about them. Discrepancies in texture - the
results of modern studio and recording techniques - mean that they

belong neither to the present nor to the past but to some implied
‘timeless’ era, an eternal 1960s or an eternal 80s. The ‘classic’ sound, its
elements now serenely liberated from the pressures of historical
becoming, can now be periodically buffed up by new technology.

It is important to be clear about what Jameson means by the ‘nostalgia
mode’. He is not referring to psychological nostalgia - indeed, the
nostalgia mode as Jameson theorises it might be said to preclude
psychological nostalgia, since it arises only when a coherent sense of
historical time breaks down. The kind of figure capable of exhibiting and
expressing a yearning for the past belongs, actually, to a
paradigmatically modernist moment - think, for instance, of Proust’s and
Joyce’s ingenious exercises in recovering lost time. Jameson’s nostalgia
mode is better understood in terms of a formal attachment to the
techniques and formulas of the past, a consequence of a retreat from the
modernist challenge of innovating cultural forms adequate to
contemporary experience. Jameson’s example is Lawrence Kasdan’s now
half-forgotten film Body Heat (1981), which, although it was officially set
in the 1980s, feels as if it belongs to the 30s. ‘Body Heat is technically
not a nostalgia film,’ Jameson writes,

since it takes place in a contemporary setting, in a little Florida village
near Miami. On the other hand, this technical contemporaneity is most
ambiguous indeed...Technically,...its objects (its cars, for instance) are
1980s products, but everything in the film conspires to blur that
immediate contemporary reference and to make it possible to receive
this too as nostalgia work - as a narrative set in some indefinable
nostalgic past, an eternal 1930s, say, beyond history. It seems to me
exceedingly symptomatic to find the very style of nostalgia films
invading and colonizing even those movies today which have
contemporary settings, as though, for some reason, we were unable
today to focus our own present, as though we had become incapable
of achieving aesthetic representations of our own current experience.
But if that is so, then it is a terrible indictment of consumer capitalism
itself - or, at the very least, an alarming and pathological symptom of
a society that has become incapable of dealing with time and history.
(‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’ in The Cultural Turn: Selected

Writings on the Postmodern, 1983-1998, Verso, 1998, pp9-10.)

What blocks Body Heat from being a period piece or a nostalgia picture
in any straightforward way is its disavowal of any explicit reference to
the past. The result is anachronism, and the paradox is that this ‘blurring
of official contemporaneity’, this ‘waning of historicity’ is increasingly
typical of our experience of cultural products. Another of Jameson’s
examples of the nostalgia mode is Star Wars:

one of the most important cultural experiences of the generations that
grew up from the 1930s to the 1950s was the Saturday afternoon
series of the Buck Rogers type - alien villains, true American heroes,
heroines in distress, the death ray or the doomsday box, and the cliff-
hanger at the end whose miraculous solution was to be witnessed next
Saturday afternoon. Star Wars reinvents this experience in the form of
a pastiche; there is no point to a parody of such series, since they are
long extinct. Far from being a pointless satire of such dead forms, Star
Wars satisfies a deep (might I even say repressed?) longing to
experience them again: it is a complex object in which on some first
level children and adolescents can take the adventures straight, while
the adult public is able to gratify a deeper and more properly nostalgic
desire to return to that older period and to live its strange old
aesthetic artefacts through once again. (‘Postmodernism and
Consumer Society’, p8)

There is no nostalgia for a historical period here (or if there is, it is only
indirect): the longing of which Jameson writes is a yearning for a form.
Star Wars is a particularly resonant example of postmodern anachronism,
because of the way it used technology to obfuscate its archaic form.
Belying its origins in these fusty adventure series forms, Star Wars could
appear new because its then unprecedented special effects relied upon
the latest technology. If, in a paradigmatically modernist way, Kraftwerk
used technology to allow new forms to emerge, the nostalgia mode
subordinated technology to the task of refurbishing the old. The effect
was to disguise the disappearance of the future as its opposite.

The future didn’t disappear overnight. Berardi’s phrase ‘the slow

cancellation of the future’ is so apt because it captures the gradual yet
relentless way in which the future has been eroded over the last 30
years. If the late 1970s and early 80s were the moment when the current
crisis of cultural temporality could first be felt, it was only during the
first decade of the 21st century that what Simon Reynolds calls
‘dyschronia’ has become endemic. This dyschronia, this temporal
disjuncture, ought to feel uncanny, yet the predominance of what
Reynolds calls ‘retro-mania’ means that it has lost any unheimlich charge:
anachronism is now taken for granted. Jameson’s postmodernism - with
its tendencies towards retrospection and pastiche - has been naturalised.
Take someone like the stupendously successful Adele: although her
music is not marketed as retro, there is nothing that marks out her
records as belonging to the 21st century either. Like so much
contemporary cultural production, Adele’s recordings are saturated with
a vague but persistent feeling of the past without recalling any specific
historical moment.

Jameson equates the postmodern ‘waning of historicity’ with the
‘cultural logic of late capitalism’, but he says little about why the two are
synonymous. Why did the arrival of neoliberal, post-Fordist capitalism
lead to a culture of retrospection and pastiche? Perhaps we can venture
a couple of provisional conjectures here. The first concerns consumption.
Could it be that neoliberal capitalism’s destruction of solidarity and
security brought about a compensatory hungering for the well-
established and the familiar? Paul Virilio has written of a ‘polar inertia’
that is a kind of effect of and counterweight to the massive speeding up
of communication. Virilio’s example is Howard Hughes, living in one
hotel room for 15 years, endlessly rewatching Ice Station Zebra. Hughes,
once a pioneer in aeronautics, became an early explorer of the
existential terrain that cyberspace will open up, where it is no longer
necessary to physically move in order to access the whole history of
culture. Or, as Berardi has argued, the intensity and precariousness of
late capitalist work culture leaves people in a state where they are
simultaneously exhausted and overstimulated. The combination of
precarious work and digital communications leads to a besieging of
attention. In this insomniac, inundated state, Berardi claims, culture
becomes de-eroticised. The art of seduction takes too much time, and,
according to Berardi, something like Viagra answers not to a biological

but to a cultural deficit: desperately short of time, energy and attention,
we demand quick fixes. Like another of Berardi’s examples,
pornography, retro offers the quick and easy promise of a minimal
variation on an already familiar satisfaction.

The other explanation for the link between late capitalism and
retrospection centres on production. Despite all its rhetoric of novelty
and innovation, neoliberal capitalism has gradually but systematically
deprived artists of the resources necessary to produce the new. In the
UK, the postwar welfare state and higher education maintenance grants
constituted an indirect source of funding for most of the experiments in
popular culture between the 1960s and the 80s. The subsequent
ideological and practical attack on public services meant that one of the
spaces where artists could be sheltered from the pressure to produce
something that was immediately successful was severely circumscribed.
As public service broadcasting became ‘marketised’, there was an
increased tendency to turn out cultural productions that resembled what
was already successful. The result of all of this is that the social time
available for withdrawing from work and immersing oneself in cultural
production drastically declined. If there’s one factor above all else which
contributes to cultural conservatism, it is the vast inflation in the cost of
rent and mortgages. It’s no accident that the efflorescence of cultural
invention in London and New York in the late 1970s and early 80s (in
the punk and postpunk scenes) coincided with the availability of
squatted and cheap property in those cities. Since then, the decline of
social housing, the attacks on squatting, and the delirious rise in
property prices have meant that the amount of time and energy
available for cultural production has massively diminished. But perhaps
it was only with the arrival of digital communicative capitalism that this
reached terminal crisis point. Naturally, the besieging of attention
described by Berardi applies to producers as much as consumers.
Producing the new depends upon certain kinds of withdrawal - from, for
instance, sociality as much as from pre-existing cultural forms - but the
currently dominant form of socially networked cyberspace, with its
endless opportunities for micro-contact and its deluge of YouTube links,
has made withdrawal more difficult than ever before. Or, as Simon
Reynolds so pithily put it, in recent years, everyday life has sped up, but
culture has slowed down.

No matter what the causes for this temporal pathology are, it is clear
that no area of Western culture is immune from them. The former
redoubts of futurism, such as electronic music, no longer offer escape
from formal nostalgia. Music culture is in many ways paradigmatic of
the fate of culture under post-Fordist capitalism. At the level of form,
music is locked into pastiche and repetition. But its infrastructure has
been subject to massive, unpredictable change: the old paradigms of
consumption, retail and distribution are disintegrating, with
downloading eclipsing the physical object, record shops closing and
cover art disappearing.

Why hauntology?

What has the concept of hauntology to do with all this? It was in fact
with some reluctance that hauntology started to be applied to the
electronic music of the middle of the last decade. I’d generally found
Jacques Derrida, the inventor of the term, a frustrating thinker. As soon
as it was established in certain areas of the academy, deconstruction, the
philosophical project which Derrida founded, installed itself as a pious
cult of indeterminacy, which at its worst made a lawyerly virtue of
avoiding any definitive claim. Deconstruction was a kind of pathology of
scepticism, which induced hedging, infirmity of purpose and compulsory
doubt in its followers. It elevated particular modes of academic practice
- Heidegger’s priestly opacity, literary theory’s emphasis on the ultimate
instability of any interpretation - into quasi-theological imperatives.
Derrida’s circumlocutions seemed like a disintensifying influence.

It’s by no means irrelevant to point out here that my first encounter
with Derrida took place in what is now a vanished milieu. It came in the
pages of the New Musical Express in the 1980s, where Derrida’s name
would be mentioned by the most exciting writers. (And, actually, part of
my frustration with Derrida’s work came out of disappointment. The
enthusiasm of NME writers like Ian Penman and Mark Sinker for
Derrida, and the formal and conceptual inventiveness it seemed to
provoke in their writing, created expectations which Derrida’s own work
couldn’t meet when I eventually came to read it.) It’s hard to believe this
now but, along with public service broadcasting, the NME constituted a
kind of supplementary-informal education system, in which theory

acquired a strange, lustrous glamour. I had also seen Derrida in Ken
McMullen’s film Ghost Dance, shown late at night on Channel 4 in the
early days of the network, at a time before we had a VCR, when I had to
resort to washing my face with cold water to try to keep myself awake.

Derrida coined the term ‘hauntology’ in his Specters of Marx: The State
of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. ‘To haunt
does not mean to be present, and it is necessary to introduce haunting
into the very construction of a concept,’ he wrote. (Jacques Derrida,
Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New
International, Routledge, 1994, p202) Hauntology was this concept, or
puncept. The pun was on the philosophical concept of ontology, the
philosophical study of what can be said to exist. Hauntology was the
successor to previous concepts of Derrida’s such as the trace and
differance; like those earlier terms, it referred to the way in which
nothing enjoys a purely positive existence. Everything that exists is
possible only on the basis of a whole series of absences, which precede
and surround it, allowing it to possess such consistency and intelligibility
that it does. In the famous example, any particular linguistic term gains
its meaning not from its own positive qualities but from its difference
from other terms. Hence Derrida’s ingenious deconstructions of the
‘metaphysics of presence’ and ‘phonocentrism’, which expose the way in
which particular dominant forms of thought had (incoherently)
privileged the voice over writing.

But hauntology explicitly brings into play the question of time in a
way that had not quite been the case with the trace or differance. One of
the repeated phrases in Specters of Marx is from Hamlet, ‘the time is out
of joint’ and in his recent Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life,
Martin Hagglund argues that it is possible to see all of Derrida’s work in
relation to this concept of broken time. ‘Derrida’s aim,’ Hagglund argues,
‘is to formulate a general ‘hauntology’ (hantologie), in contrast to the
traditional ‘ontology’ that thinks being in terms of self-identical
presence. What is important about the figure of the specter, then, is that
it cannot be fully present: it has no being in itself but marks a relation to
what is no longer or not yet’ (Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life,
Stanford University Press, 2008, p82)

Is hauntology, then, some attempt to revive the supernatural, or is it
just a figure of speech? The way out of this unhelpful opposition is to

think of hauntology as the agency of the virtual, with the spectre
understood not as anything supernatural, but as that which acts without
(physically) existing. The great thinkers of modernity, Freud as well as
Marx, had discovered different modes of this spectral causality. The late
capitalist world, governed by the abstractions of finance, is very clearly
a world in which virtualities are effective, and perhaps the most ominous
‘spectre of Marx’ is capital itself. But as Derrida underlines in his
interviews in the Ghost Dance film, psychoanalysis is also a ‘science of
ghosts’, a study of how reverberant events in the psyche become
revenants.

Referring back to Hagglund’s distinction between the no longer and the
not yet, we can provisionally distinguish two directions in hauntology.
The first refers to that which is (in actuality is) no longer, but which
remains effective as a virtuality (the traumatic ‘compulsion to repeat’, a
fatal pattern). The second sense of hauntology refers to that which (in
actuality) has not yet happened, but which is already effective in the
virtual (an attractor, an anticipation shaping current behaviour). The
‘spectre of communism’ that Marx and Engels had warned of in the first
lines of the Communist Manifesto was just this kind of ghost: a virtuality
whose threatened coming was already playing a part in undermining the
present state of things.

In addition to being another moment in Derrida’s own philosophical
project of deconstruction, Specters of Marx was also a specific
engagement with the immediate historical context provided by the
disintegration of the Soviet empire. Or rather, it was an engagement
with the alleged disappearance of history trumpeted by Francis
Fukuyama in his The End of History and the Last Man. What would
happen now that actually existing socialism had collapsed, and
capitalism could assume full spectrum dominance, its claims to global
dominion were thwarted not any longer by the existence of a whole
other bloc, but by small islands of resistance such as Cuba and North
Korea? The era of what I have called ‘capitalist realism’ - the widespread
belief that there is no alternative to capitalism - has been haunted not
by the apparition of the spectre of communism, but by its disappearance.
As Derrida wrote:

There is today in the world a dominant discourse...This dominating
discourse often has the manic, jubilatory, and incantatory form that
Freud assigned to the so-called triumphant phase of mourning work.
The incantation repeats and ritualizes itself, it holds forth and holds to
formulas, like any animistic magic. To the rhythm of a cadenced
march, it proclaims: Marx is dead, communism is dead, very dead, and
along with it its hopes, its discourse, its theories, and its practices. It
says: long live capitalism, long live the market, here’s to the survival
of economic and political liberalism! (Specters of Marx, p64)

Specters of Marx was also a series of speculations about the media (or
post-media) technologies that capital had installed on its now global
territory. In this sense, hauntology was by no means something rarefied;
it was endemic in the time of ‘techno-tele-discursivity, techno-tele-
iconicity’ ‘simulacra’ and ‘synthetic images’. This discussion of the ‘tele-’
shows that hauntology concerns a crisis of space as well as time. As
theorists such as Virilio and Jean Baudrillard had long acknowledged -
and Specters of Marx can also be read as Derrida settling his account with
these thinkers - ‘tele-technologies’ collapse both space and time. Events
that are spatially distant become available to an audience
instantaneously. Neither Baudrillard nor Derrida would live to see the
full effects - no doubt I should say the full effects so far - of the ‘tele¬
technology’ that has most radically contracted space and time,
cyberspace. But here we have a first reason why the concept of
hauntology should have become attached to popular culture in the first
decade of the 21st century. For it was at this moment when cyberspace
enjoyed unprecedented dominion over the reception, distribution and
consumption of culture - especially music culture.

When it was applied to music culture - in my own writing, and in that
of other critics such as Simon Reynolds and Joseph Stannard -
hauntology first of all named a confluence of artists. The word
confluence is crucial here. For these artists - William Basinski, the Ghost
Box label, The Caretaker, Burial, Mordant Music, Philip Jeck, amongst
others - had converged on a certain terrain without actually influencing
one another. What they shared was not a sound so much as a sensibility,
an existential orientation. The artists that came to be labelled

hauntological were suffused with an overwhelming melancholy; and
they were preoccupied with the way in which technology materialised
memory - hence a fascination with television, vinyl records, audiotape,
and with the sounds of these technologies breaking down. This fixation
on materialised memory led to what is perhaps the principal sonic
signature of hauntology: the use of crackle, the surface noise made by
vinyl. Crackle makes us aware that we are listening to a time that is out
of joint; it won’t allow us to fall into the illusion of presence. It reverses
the normal order of listening according to which, as Ian Penman put it,
we are habituated to the ‘re’ of recording being repressed. We aren’t only
made aware that the sounds we are hearing are recorded, we are also
made conscious of the playback systems we use to access the recordings.
And hovering behind much sonic hauntology is the difference between
analogue and digital: so many hauntological tracks have been about
revisiting the physicality of analogue media in the era of digital ether.
MP3 files remain material, of course, but their materiality is occulted
from us, by contrast with the tactile materiality of vinyl records and
even compact discs.

No doubt a yearning for this older regime of materiality plays a part in
the melancholia that saturates hauntological music. As to the deeper
causes of this melancholia, we need look no further than the title of
Leyland Kirby’s album: Sadly , The Future Is No Longer What It Was. In
hauntological music there is an implicit acknowledgement that the hopes
created by postwar electronica or by the euphoric dance music of the
1990s have evaporated - not only has the future not arrived, it no longer
seems possible. Yet at the same time, the music constitutes a refusal to
give up on the desire for the future. This refusal gives the melancholia a
political dimension, because it amounts to a failure to accommodate to
the closed horizons of capitalist realism.

Not giving up the ghost

In Freud’s terms, both mourning and melancholia are about loss. But
whereas mourning is the slow, painful withdrawal of libido from the lost
object, in melancholia, libido remains attached to what has disappeared.
For mourning to properly begin, Derrida says in Specters of Marx, the
dead must be conjured away: ‘the conjuration has to make sure that the

dead will not come back: quick, do whatever is needed to keep the
cadaver localised, in a safe place, decomposing right where it was
inhumed, or even embalmed as they liked to do in Moscow’ (Specters of
Marx, pi 20) But there are those who refuse to allow the body to be
interred, just as there is a danger of (over)killing something to such an
extent that it becomes a spectre, a pure virtuality. ‘Capitalist societies,’
Derrida writes, ‘can always heave a sigh of relief and say to themselves:
communism is finished, but it did not take place, it was only a ghost.
They do no more than disavow the undeniable itself: a ghost never dies,
it remains always to come and to come-back.’ (Specters of Marx, pi 23)

Haunting, then, can be construed as a failed mourning. It is about
refusing to give up the ghost or - and this can sometimes amount to the
same thing - the refusal of the ghost to give up on us. The spectre will
not allow us to settle into/ for the mediocre satisfactions one can glean
in a world governed by capitalist realism.

What’s at stake in 21st century hauntology is not the disappearance of
a particular object. What has vanished is a tendency, a virtual trajectory.
One name for this tendency is popular modernism. The cultural ecology
that I referred to above - the music press and the more challenging parts
of public service broadcasting - were part of a UK popular modernism,
as were postpunk, brutalist architecture, Penguin paperbacks and the
BBC Radiophonic Workshop. In popular modernism, the elitist project of
modernism was retrospectively vindicated. At the same time, popular
culture definitively established that it did not have to be populist.
Particular modernist techniques were not only disseminated but
collectively reworked and extended, just as the modernist task of
producing forms which were adequate to the present moment was taken
up and renewed. Which is to say that, although of course I didn’t realise
it at the time, the culture which shaped most of my early expectations
was essentially popular modernist, and the writing that has been
collected in Ghosts Of My Life is about coming to terms with the
disappearance of the conditions which allowed it to exist.

It’s worth pausing a moment here to distinguish the haunto-logical
melancholia I’m talking about from two other kinds of melancholia. The
first is what Wendy Brown calls ‘left melancholy’. On the face of it, what
I’ve said risks being heard as a kind of leftist melancholic resignation:
although they weren’t perfect, the institutions of social democracy were much

better than anything we can hope for now, perhaps the best we can ever hope
for... In her essay ‘Resisting Left Melancholy’, Brown attacks ‘a Left that
operates without either a deep and radical critique of the status quo or a
compelling alternative to the existing order of things. But perhaps even
more troubling, it is a Left that has become more attached to its
impossibility than to its potential fruitfulness, a Left that is most at home
dwelling not in hopefulness but in its own marginality and failure, a Left
that is thus caught in a structure of melancholic attachment to a certain
strain of its own dead past, whose spirit is ghostly, whose structure of
desire is backward looking and punishing.’ (Wendy Brown, ‘Resisting
Left Melancholy’, boundary 2 26:3, 1999, p26). Yet much of what makes
the melancholy Brown analyses so pernicious is its disavowed quality.
Brown’s left melancholic is a depressive who believes he is realistic;
someone who no longer has any expectation that his desire for radical
transformation could be achieved, but who doesn’t recognise that he has
given up. In her discussion of Brown’s essay in The Communist Horizon,
Jodi Dean refers to Lacan’s formula: ‘the only thing one can be guilty of
is giving ground relative to one’s desire’ and the shift that Brown
describes - from a left that confidently assumed the future belonged to
it, to a left that makes a virtue of its own incapacity to act - seems to
exemplify the transition from desire (which in Lacanian terms is the
desire to desire) to drive (an enjoyment through failure). The kind of
melancholia I’m talking about, by contrast, consists not in giving up on
desire but in refusing to yield. It consists, that is to say, in a refusal to
adjust to what current conditions call ‘reality’ - even if the cost of that
refusal is that you feel like an outcast in your own time...

The second kind of melancholia that hauntological melancholia must
be distinguished from is what Paul Gilroy calls ‘postcolonial
melancholia’. Gilroy defines this melancholia in terms of an avoidance; it
is about evading ‘the painful obligations to work through the grim
details of imperial and colonial history and to transform paralyzing guilt
into a more productive shame that would be conducive to the building
of a multicultural nationality that is no longer phobic about the prospect
of exposure to either strangers or otherness.’ (Paul Gilroy, Postcolonial
Melancholia, Columbia University Press, 2005, p99) It comes out of a
‘loss of a fantasy of omnipotence’. Like Brown’s left melancholy, then,
postcolonial melancholia is a disavowed form of melancholia: its

‘signature combination’, Gilroy writes, is that of ‘manic elation with
misery, self-loathing, and ambivalence.’ (Postcolonial Melancholia, pl04)
The postcolonial melancholic doesn’t (just) refuse to accept change; at
some level, he refuses to accept that change has happened at all. He
incoherently holds on to the fantasy of omnipotence by experiencing
change only as decline and failure, for which, naturally, the immigrant
other must be blamed (the incoherence here is obvious: if the
postcolonial melancholic were really omnipotent, how could he be
harmed by the immigrant?). At first sight, it might be possible to see
hauntological melancholia as a variant of postcolonial melancholia:
another example of white boy whingeing over lost privileges...Yet this
would be to grasp what has been lost only in the terms of the worst kind
of resentment ressentiment, or in terms of what Alex Williams has called
negative solidarity, in which we are invited to celebrate, not an increase
in liberation, but the fact that another group has now been immiserated;
and this is especially sad when the group in question was predominantly
working class.

Nostalgia compared to what?

This raises the question of nostalgia again: is hauntology, as many of its
critics have maintained, simply a name for nostalgia? Is it about pining
for social democracy and its institutions? Given the ubiquity of the
formal nostalgia I described above, the question has to be, nostalgia
compared to what? It seems strange to have to argue that comparing the
present unfavourably with the past is not automatically nostalgic in any
culpable way, but such is the power of the dehistoricising pressures of
populism and PR that the claim has to be explicitly made. PR and
populism propagate the relativistic illusion that intensity and innovation
are equally distributed throughout all cultural periods. It is the tendency
to falsely overestimate the past that makes nostalgia egregious: but, one
of the lessons of Andy Beckett’s history of Britain in the 1970s, When The
Lights Went Out is that, in many ways, we falsely underestimate a period
like the 70s - Beckett in effect shows that capitalist realism was built on
a myth-monstering of the decade. Conversely, we are induced by
ubiquitous PR into falsely overestimating the present, and those who
can’t remember the past are condemned to have it resold to them

forever.

If the 1970s were in many respects better than neoliberalism wants us
to remember them, we must also recognise the extent to which the
capitalist dystopia of 21st-century culture is not something that was
simply imposed on us - it was built out of our captured desires. ‘Almost
everything I was afraid of happening over the past 30 years has
happened,’ Jeremy Gilbert has observed. ‘Everything my political
mentors warned might happen, since I was a boy growing up on a poor
council estate (that’s a housing project, if you’re American) in the North
of England in the early 80s, or a high-school student reading
denunciations of Thatcherism in the left press a few years later, has
turned out just as badly as they said it would. And yet I don’t wish I was
living 40 years ago. The point seems to be: this is the world we were all
afraid of; but it’s also sort of the world we wanted.’ (Jeremy Gilbert,
‘Moving on from the Market Society: Culture (and Cultural Studies) in a
Post-Democratic Age’,

http://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/jeremy-gilbert/moving-
on-from-market-society-culture-and-cultural-studies-in-post-democra)

But we shouldn’t have to choose between, say, the internet and social
security. One way of thinking about hauntology is that its lost futures do
not force such false choices; instead, what haunts is the spectre of a
world in which all the marvels of communicative technology could be
combined with a sense of solidarity much stronger than anything social
democracy could muster.

Popular modernism was by no means a completed project, some
pristine zenith that needed no further improvement. In the 1970s,
certainly, culture was opened up to working-class inventiveness in a way
that is now scarcely imaginable to us; but this was also a time when
casual racism, sexism and homophobia were routine features of the
mainstream. Needless to say, the struggles against racism and
(hetero)sexism have not in the meantime been won, but they have made
significant hegemonic advances, even as neoliberalism has corroded the
social democratic infrastructure which allowed increased working class
participation in cultural production. The disarticulation of class from
race, gender and sexuality has in fact been central to the success of the
neoliberal project - making it seem, grotesquely, as if neoliberalism were
in some way a precondition of the gains made in anti-racist, anti-sexist

and anti-heterosexist struggles.

What is being longed for in hauntology is not a particular period, but
the resumption of the processes of democratisation and pluralism for
which Gilroy calls. Perhaps it’s useful to remind ourselves here that
social democracy has only become a resolved totality in retrospect; at
the time, it was a compromise formation, which those on the left saw as
a temporary bridgehead from which further gains could be won. What
should haunt us is not the no longer of actually existing social
democracy, but the not yet of the futures that popular modernism trained
us to expect, but which never materialised. These spectres - the spectres
of lost futures - reproach the formal nostalgia of the capitalist realist
world.

Music culture was central to the projection of the futures which have
been lost. The term music culture is crucial here, because it is the culture
constellated around music (fashion, discourse, cover art) that has been
as important as the music itself in conjuring seductively unfamiliar
worlds. The destranging of music culture in the 21st century - the ghastly
return of industry moguls and boys next door to mainstream pop; the
premium put on ‘reality’ in popular entertainment; the increased
tendency of those in music culture to dress and look like digitally and
surgically enhanced versions of regular folk; the emphasis placed on
gymnastic emoting in singing - has played a major role in conditioning
us to accept consumer capitalism’s model of ordinariness. Michael Hardt
and Antonio Negri are right when they say that the revolutionary take
on race, gender and sexuality struggles goes far beyond the demand that
different identities be recognised. Ultimately, it is about the dismantling
of identity. The ‘revolutionary process of the abolition of identity, we
should keep in mind, is monstrous, violent, and traumatic. Don’t try to
save yourself—in fact, your self has, to be sacrificed! This does not mean
that liberation casts us into an indifferent sea with no objects of
identification, but rather the existing identities will no longer serve as
anchors.’ (Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth, Harvard
University Press, 2011, p339) While Hardt and Negri are correct to warn
of the traumatic dimensions of this transformation, as they are also
aware, it also has its joyful aspects. Throughout the 20th century, music
culture was a probe that played a major role in preparing the population
to enjoy a future that was no longer white, male or heterosexual, a future

in which the relinquishing of identities that were in any case poor
fictions would be a blessed relief. In the 21st century, by contrast - and
the fusion of pop with reality TV is absolutely indicative of this -
popular music culture has been reduced to being a mirror held up to late
capitalist subjectivity.

By now, it should already be very clear that there are different senses
of the word hauntology at play in Ghosts Of My Life. There is the specific
sense in which it has been applied to music culture, and a more general
sense, where it refers to persistences, repetitions, prefigurations. There
are also more or less benign versions of hauntology. Ghosts Of My Life
will move amongst these different uses of the term.

The book is about the ghosts of my life, so there is necessarily a
personal dimension to what follows. Yet my take on the old phrase ‘the
personal is political’ has been to look for the (cultural, structural,
political) conditions of subjectivity. The most productive way of reading
the ‘personal is political’ is to interpret it as saying: the personal is
impersonal. It’s miserable for anyone at all to he themselves (still more, to
be forced to sell themselves). Culture, and the analysis of culture, is
valuable insofar as it allows an escape from ourselves.

Such insights have been hard won. Depression is the most malign
spectre that has dogged my life - and I use the term depression to
distinguish the dreary solipsism of the condition from the more lyrical
(and collective) desolations of haunto-logical melancholia. I started
blogging in 2003 whilst still in such a state of depression that I found
everyday life scarcely bearable. Some of these writings were part of the
working through of the condition, and it’s no accident that my (so far
successful) escape from depression coincided with a certain
externalisation of negativity: the problem wasn’t (just) me but the
culture around me. It’s clear to me that now the period from roughly
2003 to the present will be recognised - not in the far distant future, but
very soon - as the worst period for (popular) culture since the 1950s. To
say that the culture was desolate is not to say that there weren’t traces of
other possibilities. Ghosts Of My Life is an attempt to engage with some
of these traces.

Ghosts Of My Life: Goldie, Japan, Tricky

It must have been 1994 when I first saw Rufige Kru’s ‘Ghosts Of My Life’
on the shelves of a high street record store. The four-track EP had been
released in 1993, but this was a time - before internet hype and online
discographies - when the traces of the underground took longer to
surface. The EP was a prime example of darkside Jungle. Jungle was a
moment in what Simon Reynolds would come to call the ‘hardcore
continuum’: the series of mutations on the British dance music
underground triggered by the introduction of the breakbeat into Rave,
passing from hardcore Rave into Jungle, Speed Garage, 2-step.

I’ll always prefer the name Jungle to the more pallid and misleading
term drum and bass, because much of the allure of the genre came from
the fact that no drums or bass guitar were played. Instead of simulating
the already-existing qualities of ‘real’ instruments, digital technology was
exploited to produce sounds that had no pre-existing correlates. The
function of timestretching - which allowed the time signature of a sound
to be changed, without its pitch being altered - transformed sampled
breakbeats into rhythms that no human could play. Producers would
also use the strange metallic excrescence that was produced when
samples were slowed down and the software had to fill in the gaps. The
result was an abstract rush that made chemicals all but redundant:
accelerating our metabolisms, heightening our expectations,
reconstructing our nervous systems.

It is also worth holding onto the name Jungle because it evokes a
terrain: the urban Jungle, or rather the underside of a metropolis that
was just in the process of being digitalised. It has sometimes seemed as if
the use of the word ‘urban’ is a polite synonym for ‘black’ music. Yet it’s
possible to hear ‘urban’, not as some disavowal of race, but as an
invocation of the powers of cosmopolitan conviviality. At the same time,
however, Jungle was by no means an unequivocal celebration of the
urban. If Jungle celebrated anything, it was the lure of the dark. Jungle
liberated the suppressed libido in the dystopian impulse, releasing and

amplifying the jouissance that comes from anticipating the annihilation
of all current certainties. As Kodwo Eshun argued, in Jungle there was a
libidinisation of anxiety itself, a transformation of fight and flight
impulses into enjoyment.

This was deeply ambivalent: at one level, what we were hearing here
was a kind of sonic fictional intensification and extrapolation of the
neoliberal world’s destruction of solidarity and security. Nostalgia for
the familiarity of smalltown life was rejected in Jungle, but its digital
city was devoid of the comfort of strangers: no-one could be trusted
here. Jungle took many of its cues from the Hobbesian scenarios of
1980s films such as Blade Runner ; Terminator and Predator 2. It’s no
accident that all three of these films are about hunting. Jungle’s world
was one in which entities - human as well as nonhuman - stalked each
other for sport as well as for sustenance. Yet darkside Jungle was about
the thrill of the chased, about the videogame euphoria-anxiety of
eluding ruthless predators, as much as it was about the exhilaration of
running prey to ground.

At another level, darkside Jungle projected the very future that capital
can only disavow. Capital can never openly admit that it is a system
based on inhuman rapacity; the Terminator can never remove its human
mask. Jungle not only ripped the mask off, it actively identified with the
inorganic circuitry beneath: hence the android/ death’s head that Rufige
Kru used as their logo. The paradoxical identification with death, and
the equation of death with the inhuman future was more than a cheap
nihilist gesture. At a certain point, the unrelieved negativity of the
dystopian drive trips over into a perversely utopian gesture, and
annihilation becomes the condition of the radically new.

I was a postgraduate student in 1994, and I didn’t have either the
nerve or the money to hang around specialist record shops to pick up all
the latest releases. So I would access Jungle tracks in much the same
fitful way that I had followed American comics in the 70s. I would pick
them up where and when I could, usually on CD compilations issued
long after their dubplate freshness had cooled. For the most part, it was
impossible to impose any narrative on Jungle’s relentless flow. Fittingly
for a sound that was so depersonalised and dehumanised, the names of
the acts tended to be cryptic cyberpunk tags, disconnected from any
biography or place. Jungle was best enjoyed as an anonymous electro-

libidinal current that seemed to pass through producers, as a series of
affects and FX that were de-linked from authors. It sounded like some
audio unlife form, a ferocious, feral artificial intelligence that had been
unwittingly called up in the studio, the breakbeats like genetically-
augmented hounds straining to be free of the leash.

Rufige Kru were one of the few Jungle acts about which I knew a
little. Because of Simon Reynolds’ evangelical pieces on Jungle in the
now long-defunct Melody Maker, I was aware that Rufige Kru was one of
the aliases used by Goldie, who, almost uniquely in the anonymity of the
Jungle scene, was already becoming a recognisable face. If there was to
be a face for this faceless music, then Goldie - a mixed race former
graffiti artist with gold teeth - was a strong candidate. Goldie was
formed by hip-hop culture, but irrevocably altered by Rave’s collective
delirium. His career became a parable for a whole series of impasses.
The temptation for any producer emerging from the scenius of the
hardcore continuum was always to renounce the essentially collective
nature of the conditions of production. It was a temptation that Goldie
was unable to resist, but, tellingly, his records declined the very moment
he stopped using impersonal, collective names for his projects, and
started releasing them under the (albeit assumed) name Goldie. His first
album, Timeless, smoothed out the anorganic angles of Jungle with the
use of analogue instruments and an alarming jazz-funk tastefulness.
Goldie became a minor celebrity, took a part in the BBC soap opera
EastEnders, and only in 2008 released the kind of album that Rufige Kru
should have put out 15 years before. The lesson was clear: urban British
artists can only be successful if they depart from the scenius, if they
leave behind the collective.

The first records Goldie and his collaborators released under the
names Rufige Kru and Metalheads were still high on Rave’s carny buzz.
1992’s ‘Terminator’ was the most epochal: jittery with excitable rave
stabs, its phased and timestretched beats suggested aberrant, impossible
geometries, while its vocal samples - from Linda Hamilton in Terminator
- talked of time paradoxes and fatal strategies. The record sounded like a
commentary on itself: as if the temporal anomalies that Hamilton
described - ‘you’re talking about things that I haven’t done yet in the
past tense’ - were made physical in the vertiginously imploding sound.

As Rufige Kru progressed their sound became sleeker. Where the early

records put one in mind of an assemblage of dismembered organs that
had been crudely stitched together, the later releases more closely
resembled mutants that had been genetically engineered. The unruly and
volatile Rave elements had gradually drained away, to be replaced by
textures that were starker, moodier. The titles - ‘Dark Rider’, ‘Fury’,
‘Manslaughter’ - told their own story. As you listened, you felt like you
were being pursued through a near-future brutalist arcade. Vocal
samples were cut back, and became more subdued and ominous.
‘Manslaughter’ features one of the most electrifying lines from Blade
Runner’s rogue replicant Roy Batty: ‘If only you could see what I’ve seen,
through your eyes’ - the perfect slogan for Jungle’s new mutants,
engineered by street science to have heightened senses but a shorter life
span.

I bought any Rufige Kru record that I came upon, but ‘Ghosts Of My
Life’ brought a special tingle of intrigue because of its title, with its
suggestion of Japan’s 1981 art pop masterpiece, ‘Ghosts’. When I played
the ‘Ghosts Of My Life’ 12’, I quickly realised with a shiver of
exhilaration that the pitched down voice repeating the title phrase did
indeed belong to Japan’s David Sylvian. But this wasn’t the only trace of
‘Ghosts’. After some atonal washes and twitchy breakbeats, the track
lurched to a sudden halt, and - in a moment that still takes my breath
away when I listen to it now - a brief snatch of the spidery, abstract
electronics instantly recognizable from the Japan record leapt into the
chasm, before being immediately consumed by viscous bass ooze and the
synthetic screeches that were the sonic signatures of darkside Jungle.

Time had folded in on itself. One of my earliest pop fixations had
returned, vindicated, in an unexpected context. Early 80s New Romantic
synthpop, reviled and ridiculed in Britain, but revered in the dance
music scenes of Detroit, New York and Chicago, was finally coming
home to roost in the UK underground. Kodwo Eshun, then at work on his
More Brilliant than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction, would argue that
synthpop played the same founding role for Techno, hip-hop and Jungle
as delta blues did for rock, and it was as if a disavowed part of myself -
a ghost from another part of my life - was being recovered, although in
a permanently altered form.

‘Just when I think I’m winning’

In 1982, I taped ‘Ghosts’ from the radio and chain-listened to it: pressing
play, rewinding the cassette, repeating. ‘Ghosts’ is a record which, even
now, compels you to keep replaying it. Partly, that’s because of the way
the record teems with detail: you never feel you’ve fully grasped it all.

Nothing else that Japan recorded was like ‘Ghosts’. It as an anomaly,
not only because of its seeming confessionalism, exceptional in the work
of a group which favoured aesthetic poses over emotional expression,
but also because of its arrangement, its texture. Elsewhere on Tin Drum -
the 1981 album from which ‘Ghosts’ came - Japan had developed a
plastic ethno-funk, where electronics flitted through the elasticated
rhythmic architecture created by the bass and drums. On ‘Ghosts’,
however, there are no drums and no bassline. There is only percussion
that sounds like metallic vertebrae being gently struck, and a suite of
sounds so austerely synthetic that they could have come from
Stockhausen.

‘Ghosts’ begins with chimes that make you feel like you are inside
some metallic clock. The air is charged, an electrical field through which
unintelligible radio-wave chitterings pass. At the same time, the track is
pervaded by an immense stillness, a poise. Watch the group’s
extraordinary live performance of ‘Ghosts’ on the Old Grey Whistle Test.
They look as if they are tending their instruments rather than playing
them.

Only Sylvian appears animated, and then it’s only his face, half-hidden
by the heavy fringe, that moves. The mannered angst of his vocal sits
oddly with the electronic austerity of the music. Its sense of enervated
foreboding is broken by the only trace of melodrama in the song - the
synth stabs which, simulating the kind of strings you’d hear on a movie
thriller-score, cue in the chorus. ‘Just when I think I’m win-ning/ when I’ve
broken every door/ the ghosts of my life/ blow wild-er/ than the win-d’...

What, exactly, are the ghosts that haunt Sylvian? The song derives
much of its potency from declining to answer, from its lack of specificity:
we can fill in the blanks with our own spectres. What’s clear is that it
isn’t external contingencies which ruin his wellbeing. Something from
his past - something he wants to have left behind - keeps returning. He
can’t leave it behind because he carries it with him. Is he anticipating

the destruction of his happiness, or has the destruction already
happened? The present tense - or rather the hesitation between past and
present tense - creates an ambiguity, suggesting a fatalistic eternity, a
compulsion to repeat - a compulsion that might be a self-fulfilling
prophecy. The ghosts return because he fears they will...

It’s hard not to hear ‘Ghosts’ as a reflection of sorts on Japan’s career
up to that point. The group was the culmination of a certain English take
on art pop that began with Bowie and Roxy in the early 70s. They came
from Beckenham, Catford, Lewisham the unglamorous conurbation
where Kent joins South London - the same suburban hinterland from
which David Bowie, Billy Idol and Siouxsie Sioux had come. As with
most English art pop, Japan found their environment only a negative
inspiration, something to escape from. ‘There was a conscious drive
away from everything that childhood represented,’ Sylvian has
remarked. Pop was the portal out of the prosaic. Music was only part of
it. Art pop was a finishing school for working class autodidacts, where,
by following up the clues left behind by earlier pioneers - the allusions
secreted in lyrics, in track titles or in interview references - you could
learn about things that weren’t on the formal curriculum for working
class youth: fine art, European cinema, avant-garde literature...Changing
your name was the first step, and Sylvian had traded his given name
(Batt) for one that referred to Sylvain Sylvain from the New York Dolls,
the group whose style Japan had begun by imitating.

By the time of ‘Ghosts’, all of the ersatz Amerikan swagger of this
Dolls phase is long forgotten, and Sylvian has long since perfected his
plastic mass-produced copy of Bryan Ferry. In his analysis of Bryan
Ferry’s voice, Ian Penman argues that its peculiar quality came from an
only partly successful attempt to get his Geordie accent to forge a classic,
timeless Englishness. Sylvian’s singing voice is the faking of a fake. The
almost whinnying quality of Ferry’s angst is retained, but transposed into
a pure styling devoid of emotional content. It is culture(d), not natural at
all; prissy, ultra-affected, and, for that very reason, strangely lacking in
affect. It couldn’t contrast more with Sylvian’s speaking voice at the time
- awkward, tentative, strongly bearing all the traces of class and South
London which his singing voice had sought to remove. ‘Sons of pioneers/
are hungry men. ’

‘Ghosts’ was paralysed by very English anxieties: you could imagine

Pip from Great Expectations singing it. In England, working class escape
is always haunted by the possibility that you will be found out, that your
roots are showing. You won’t know some crucial rule of etiquette that
you should. You will pronounce something wrongly - mispronunciation
is a constant source of anxiety for the autodidact, because books don’t
necessarily tell you how to say words. Is ‘Ghosts’ the moment when art
pop confronts this fear - that class will out, that one’s background can
never be transcended, that the rude spectres of Lewisham will return no
matter how far East you travel?

Japan had pursued art pop into a sheer superficiality, which exceeded
even their inspirations in its depthless aestheticism. Tin Drum, the 1981
album from which ‘Ghosts’ came, was art pop as Barthes pop, a
conspicuous playing with signs for their own seductive sake. The album
cover immediately drew you into their heavily confected world: Sylvian,
his heavily sprayed, peroxided fringe falling artfully over his Trevor
Horn specs, sits in a simulation of a simple Chinese dwelling, chopsticks
in hand, as a Mao poster peels from the wall behind him. Everything is
posed, every Sign selected with a fetishistic fastidiousness. Check the
way his eyeshadow gives his eyelids an almost opiated heaviness - but,
at the same time, everything is so painfully fragile; his face a Noh-mask,
anemically ultra-white, his body posture ragdoll drained. Here he is, one
of the last glam princes, and perhaps the most magnificent - his face and
body rare and delicate works of art, not extrinsic to, or lesser than, the
music, but forming an integral component of the overall concept. All -
social, political, cultural - meaning seems to be drained from these
references. When Sylvian sings ‘Red Army needs you’ on the closing
track, ‘Cantonese Boy’, it is in the same spirit of semiotic orientalism: the
Chinese and Japanese Empires of signs are reduced to images, exploited
and coveted for their frission.

By the time of Tin Drum, Japan have perfected their transition from
New York Dolls-trash-hounds to gentlemen connoisseurs, from working
class Beckenham youth into cosmopolitan men about town. (Or they’ve
achieved as much as is possible: ‘Ghosts’ suggests that the transition will
never be so successful as to eliminate anxiety: the more you’ve disguised
your background, the more it will hurt when it is exposed.) Tin Drum’s
superficiality is the superficiality of the (glossy) photograph, the group’s
detachment that of the photographer. Images are decontextualised, then

re-assembled to form an ‘Oriental’ panorama that is strangely abstract: a
Far East as surrealist novelist Raymond Roussel might have reimagined
it. Like Ferry, Sylvian remains Subject as well as Object: not only the
frozen Image, but also he who assembles images, not in any
pathological, Peeping Tom sense, but in a coolly detached way. The
detachment, naturally, is a performance, concealing anxiety even as it
sublimates it. The words are little labyrinths, enigmas with no possible
solution - the appearance of enigmas, perhaps - false-fronted follies
decorated with Chinese and Japanese motifs.

Sylvian’s voice belongs to this masquerade. Even on ‘Ghosts’, Sylvian’s
voice does not ask to be taken at face value. It is not a voice that reveals,
or even pretends to reveal, it is a voice to hide behind, just like the
make-up, the conspicuously-worn sino-signs. It’s not only the fixation on
geography that makes Sylvian seem like a tourist, an outside observer
even in his own ‘inner’ life. His voice seems to come entirely from his
head, barely from his body at all.

And after this? Japan would fall apart, while Duran Duran were
already more than half way towards taking a lumpen version of Japan’s
schtick into superstardom. For Sylvian, there was a pursuit of
‘authenticity’, which was connoted by two things: the turn away from
rhythm and the embracing of ‘real’ instruments. The wiping away of the
cosmetics, the quest for Meaning, the discovery of a Real Self. Yet, until
2003’s Blemish, Sylvian’s solo records seemed as if they were straining
towards an emotional authenticity that his voice could never quite
deliver, only now they lacked the alibi of aestheticism.

Tin Drum was Japan’s final studio album, but it was also one of the
last moments in English art pop. One future had quietly died, but others
would surface.

‘Your eyes resemble mine...’

A fragment of Japan’s ‘Ghosts’ washed up 14 years later, on Tricky’s first
single, ‘Aftermath’. Here it wasn’t sampled, but cited, by Tricky’s
mentor, fellow Bristolian Mark Stewart. In the background of the track’s
loping-shanty rhythms, you can hear Stewart speak-sing the lines ‘just
when I thought I was winning, just when I thought I could not be
stopped... 4 The use of the Japan reference and the presence of Stewart -

a major figure in Bristol postpunk since his time with The Pop Group in
the 1970s - were already powerful clues that Tricky’s positioning as a
‘trip-hop’ artist was reductive and misleading. Too often, the label trip-
hop would be applied to what was in effect a black music with the
‘blackness’ muted or excised (hip-hop without rap). The ‘trip’ in Tricky’s
music had less to do with psychedelics and more to do with the fuggy
indolence of marijuana. But Tricky pursued ganja inertia well beyond
stoner lassitude into a visionary condition, in which rap’s aggression and
braggadocio weren’t so much removed as refracted in the heat haze of a
dreamy, hydroponic humidity.

On the face of it, Tricky’s ra(s)p could be heard as the British answer
to hip-hop, but, on a more subterranean level, what he was also taking
up and renewing were strands in postpunk and art pop. Tricky counts
postpunk acts like Blondie, The Banshees, The Cure (‘the last great pop
band, I think’, he says) as his precursors. It’s not as simple as opposing
this lineage to the soul, funk and dub references which were so obvious
in Tricky’s earliest music. Postpunk and art pop had already drawn
substantially upon funk and dub. ‘I grew up in a white ghetto,’ Tricky
said when I interviewed him in 2008. ‘My Dad’s Jamaican, my
grandmother is white. When I was growing up, till I was about 16,
everything was normal. When I moved to an ethnic ghetto, I had friends
there and my friends would say, “Why do you hang out with those
skinhead guys, the white guys?” and my skinhead friends were like,
“Why you hanging out with those black guys?” I couldn’t get it, I
couldn’t understand it. I could always go to both worlds, I could go to a
reggae club and then a white club and not even notice it because my
family is all different colours, different shades. So at Christmas, you got
a white person, black person, African looking person, Asian looking
person...we didn’t notice it, my family are colour blind. But all of a
sudden things started moving around, learning bad habits, people
whispering to you, like, “Why you hanging around with those white
guys?” These are kids I grew up with since five years old, the guys I
grew up with saying “why you hanging out with those black guys?”
Then I see The Specials on TV, these white and black guys getting
together.’

Tricky appeared at the very moment when the reactionary pantomime
of Britpop - a rock which had whitewashed out contemporary black

influences - was moving towards dominance. The phony face-off
between Blur and Oasis which preoccupied the media was a distraction
from the real fault lines in British music culture at the time. The conflict
that really mattered was between a music which acknowledged and
accelerated what was new in the 90s - technology, cultural pluralism,
genre innovations - and a music which took refuge in a monocultural
version of Britishness: a swaggering white boy rock built almost entirely
out of forms that were established in the 1960s and 1970s. This was a
music designed to reassure anxious white males at a moment when all of
the certainties they had previously counted on - in work, sexual
relations, ethnic identity - were coming under pressure. As we now
know, Britpop would win the struggle. Tricky would slink away to
become the herald of a future for British music that never materialised.
(A rapprochement of sorts between Tricky and Britpop was - thank-fully
- missed. Blur’s Damon Albarn was supposed to guest on the album
Tricky recorded under the name Nearly God - alongside The Specials’
Terry Hall, amongst many others - but the track that the pair recorded
together was removed from the album before it was released.)

When Maxinquaye was released in 1995, Tricky was immediately
anointed as the voice of a mute, depoliticised generation, the wounded
prophet who absorbed and transmitted a decade’s psychic pollution. The
extent of this adulation can be gauged by the origin of the name Nearly
God: a German journalist had asked him ‘what’s it like to be God? Well,
nearly God?’ Instead of taking up his assigned role as the imp of the
perverse in 90s mainstream pop, though, Tricky sidled off into the
sidelines, a half-forgotten figure. So much so, that when he appeared as
a guest at Bey once’s 2011 Glastonbury performance, it provoked a gasp
of shock - as if, for a moment, we’d stumbled into some alternative
reality where Tricky was where he deserved to be, a glamorous gargoyle
on the edifice of 21st century pop. All-too-symbolically, however,
Tricky’s microphone didn’t seem to be switched on, and he could barely
be heard.

‘On Maxinquaye/ Ian Penman wrote in his landmark March 1995 essay
for The Wire magazine, ‘Tricky sounds like ghosts from another solar
system’. The spectrality of Tricky’s music, the way it refused to step up or
represent, the way it slurred between lucidity and inarticulacy, made for
a sharp contrast with the multicoloured brashness of what Penman

called ‘the Face- cover/Talkin Loud/Jazzie B nexus of groovy One World
vibery’. What’s so significant about the version of multiculturalism that
Tricky and Goldie proffered was its refusal of earnestness and
worthiness. Theirs was not a music that petitioned for inclusion in any
kind of ordinariness. Instead, it revelled in its otherworld- liness, its
science-fictional glamour. Like art pop’s first pioneer, Bowie, it was
about identification with the alien, where the alien stood in for the
technologically new and the cognitively strange - and ultimately for
forms of social relations that were as yet only faintly imaginable. Bowie
was by no means the first to make this identification: loving the alien
was a gesture that self-mytholo-gizing black magi - Kodwo Eshun’s
‘sonic fictional’ canon of Lee Perry, George Clinton, Sun Ra - had made
long before Bowie first did it. Identifying with the alien - not so much
speaking for the alien as letting the alien speak through you - was what
gave 20th century popular music much of its political charge.
Identification with the alien meant the possibility of an escape from
identity, into other subjectivities, other worlds.

There was also identification with the android. ‘Aftermath’ includes a
sample of dialogue from Blade Runner: ‘I’ll tell you about my mother’,
the anti-Oedipal taunt that the replicant Leon throws at his interrogator-
tormentor before killing him. ‘Is it merely coincidence that the Sylvian
quote and the Blade Runner lift converge in the same song?’, Penman
asks.

‘Ghosts’...Replicants? Electricity has made us all angels. Technology
(from psycho-analysis to surveillance) has made us all ghosts. The
replicant (‘YOUR EYES RESEMBLE MINE...‘) is a speaking void. The
scary thing about ‘Aftermath’ is that it suggests that nowadays WE ALL
ARE. Speaking voids, made up only of scraps and citations...
contaminated by other people’s memories...adrift...

When I met Tricky in 2008, he referred unbidden to the line from
‘Aftermath’ that Penman picks up on here. ’My first lyric ever on a song
was ‘your eyes resemble mine, you’ll see as no others can’. I never had
any kids then, so what am I talking about? Who am I talking about? [My
daughter] Maisie wasn’t born. My mother used to write poetry but in her

time she couldn’t have done anything with that, there wasn’t any
opportunity. It’s almost like she killed herself to give me the
opportunity, my lyrics, I can never understand why I write as a female; I
think I’ve got my Mum’s talent, I’m her vehicle. So I need a woman to
sing that.’

Hauntology, then, telepathy, the persistence of the no longer... You
don’t have to believe in the supernatural to recognise that the family is a
haunted structure, an Overlook Hotel full of presentiments and uncanny
repetitions, something that speaks ahead of us, instead of us...From the
start - like all of us - Tricky was haunted, and the crepitational-texture
of 21st century hauntology was already being auditioned on Tricky’s
earliest recordings. When I first heard Burial a decade later, I would
immediately reach for Tricky’s first album Maxinquaye as a point of
comparison. It wasn’t only the use of vinyl crackle, so much a signature
of both Maxinquaye and Burial, that suggested the affinity. It was also
the prevailing mood, the way suffocating sadness and mumbling
melancholy bled into lovelorn eroticism and dreamspeech. Both records
feel like emotional states transformed into landscapes, but where Burial’s
music conjures urban scenes under Blade Runner perma-drizzle,
Maxinquaye feels as if it is taking place in a desert as delirial and
Daliesque as the initiatory space that the characters pass through in Nic
Roeg’s Walkabout: the land is scorched, cracked and barren, but there are
occasional bursts of verdant lushness (on the queasily erotic ‘Abbaon Fat
Tracks’, for instance, we could have strayed into the ruined pastoral of
Talk Talk’s Spirit of Eden).

‘Your eyes resemble mine...’ From the very beginning, speaking in his
dead mother’s voice, a semi-benign Norman Bates, Tricky was conscious
of his (dis)possession by female spectres. With his predilection for
cosmetics and cross-dressing, he looked like one of the last vestiges of
the glam impulse in British pop: his gender ambivalence a welcome
antidote to Britpop’s lumpen laddishness. It’s clear that gender
indeterminacy is no pantomime mummery for him, but something that
goes right to the core of his music. Saying that Tricky ‘writes from a
female point of view’ fails to capture the uncanniness of what he does,
since he also induces women to sing from what seems to be a male
perspective. ‘I like putting women in a male role, to have the woman
play the strength and the man be the weak. I was brought up, one of my

uncles was in jail for 30 years and the other for 15 years. I didn’t see my
dad, I was brought up by my grandmother and my auntie so I’ve seen
my grandmother fight in the street. I’ve seen my auntie and my
grandmother have fistfights, I’ve seen my grandmother grab my auntie’s
arm and close it in the door and break her arm fighting over meat. So I
see women as tough. They fed me, they clothed me, my grandmother
taught me to steal, my auntie taught me to fight, she sent me to boxing
when I was 15. If men go to war, you stand in one field, I stand in
another, we shoot each other, but what’s the hardest is when you are at
home and you gotta listen to kids cry and you gotta feed ‘em. That’s
tough, I’ve seen no men around, I’ve seen my uncle go jail for seven
years, then ten years, my other uncle; my Dad never rang. Women keep
it together, keep the food on the table, defend us, defend the children,
like if anyone fucked with us they would be down the school. I’ve never
seen men do that for me, I’ve never seen men there for me like that. All I
know is women.’

Gender doesn’t dissolve here into some bland unisex mush; instead it
resolves into an unstable space in which subjectivity is continually
sliding from male to female voice. It is an art of splitting which is also an
art of doubling. Through the women who sing for/as him, Tricky
becomes less than one, a split subject that can never be restored to
wholeness. Yet their voicing of his incompleteness also makes him more
than one, a double in search of a lost other half it will never recover.
Either way, what Tricky unsettles - both as a vocalist and as a writer/
producer who coaxes singing from an Other - is the idea of the voice as
a rock solid guarantor of presence and identity. His own weakened,
recessed voice, all those croaks, mumbles and murmurs, has always
suggested a presence that was barely there, something supplementary
rather than centred. But the main - usually female - voice on his songs
also sounds absented and abstracted. What the voices of his female
singers - flat, drained, destitute of ordinary affective cadences - most
resemble is the sound of a medium, a voice being spoken by something
else.

‘So this is the aftermath...’ It is not that Tricky possesses female
singers; more that he induces them into sharing his trance states. The
words that come to him from a lost female source are returned to a
female mouth. ‘I’m already on the other side’, as Martina Topley-Bird

sang on ‘I Be The Prophet’ from the Nearly God LP. Tricky’s upbringing
was particularly gothic. ‘My grandmother used to keep me at home
because my stepgrandfather used to be out working, and she used to
watch all these black and white horror movies, vampire movies, and it
was like growing up in a movie. She used to sit me in the middle of the
floor, cause she lost my mum, her daughter. She’d be playing Billie
Holiday, smoking a cigarette and would say things like “you look like
your Mum,” watching me. I was always my Mum’s ghost. I grew up in a
dreamlike state. One time I’ve seen a suicide off an NCP car park and the
police took me down to see what I saw and the next day in the Evening
Post there was my name in there. I woke up and it was on the fridge, my
grandmother had put it on the fridge like I was famous.’

The one who is possessed is also dispossessed - of their own identity
and voice. But this kind of dispossession is of course a precondition for
the most potent writing and performance. Writers have to tune into
other voices; performers must be capable of being taken over by outside
forces - and Tricky can be a great live performer because of his capacity
to work himself up into a state of head-shaking shamanic self-erasure.
Like the occult, religion provides a symbolic repertoire which deals with
the idea of an alien presence using the tongue, of the dead having
influence on the living, and Tricky’s language has always been saturated
with biblical imagery. Mcocinquaye’s purgatorial landscape was littered
with religious signs, while Pre-Millennium Tension exhibited what seemed
like religious mania: ‘I saw a Christian in Christiansands, a devil in
Helsinki.’ ‘Here come the Nazarene/look good in a magazine...Mary
Magdalene that’ll be my first sin.’

When I interviewed Tricky he had just released the single, ‘Council
Estate’. Here, class spectres spoke - but not for the first time in Tricky’s
work. Class rage could be detected smouldering in many of his tracks
from the beginning. ‘Master your language/and until then, I’ll create my
own,’ he warned on 1996’s ‘Christiansands’, casting himself as the
proletarian Caliban plotting revenge on his alleged betters. He is acutely
aware of the way in which class determines destiny. ‘Breaking into a
house or car equals locksmiths, insurance, it’s all making money off me.
The longer I’m in prison you’re making more money. Modern-day
slavery: instead of slaves, they turn them into criminals.’

Tricky called the album from which ‘Council Estate’ came Knowle

West, after the area of Bristol in which he grew up. ‘When I was at
school, there was one certain teacher who said, when you go for a job,
as soon as you put your postcode down and they know you’re from
Knowle West, you ain’t gonna get the job. So lie, if you’re going to fill in
your application forms, lie.’

‘Council Estate’ conceived of resentment as a motivating force and
success as revenge. It wasn’t about leaving your past behind, as Sylvian
wanted to, it is about succeeding so that your class origins can be forced
back down the throat of those who said you couldn’t succeed. Like so
many working class pop stars before him - including Sylvian - success
provided vindication for Tricky and gave him access to a world which
both attracted and appalled him. 1996’s ‘Tricky Kid’ was his take on the
theme of class dislocation that has preoccupied British pop since at least
as far back as The Kinks. It was the best song about a working class male
projected out of their milieu into the pleasure gardens of the hyper¬
successful since The Associates’ ‘Club Country’ (‘A drive from nowhere
leaves you in the cold...every breath you breathe belongs to someone
there’). With its febrile, Jacob’s Ladder-like vision of leering hedonism -
‘coke in your nose...everyone wants to be naked and famous’ - ‘Tricky
Kid’ anticipated the way in which, in the first decade of the 21st century,
working class ambitions would be bought off by the fool’s gold of
celebrity culture and reality TV. ‘Now they call me superstar...,’ it
demonically proclaimed, a line echoed in the refrain of ‘Council Estate’.
Why is ‘superstar’ such an important word for him? ‘Because it’s such a
stupid word in a way. What used to happen is that you make an album,
and if your album’s successful, fame is almost part of the game. When I
was starting off, I just wanted to make a good album, I wanted to make
something that no one’s ever heard before - I wasn’t interested in
anything else.’

No Longer the Pleasures: Joy Division

Adapted from k-punk post , January 9, 2005

If Joy Division matter now more than ever, it’s because they capture the
depressed spirit of our times. Listen to JD now, and you have the
inescapable impression that the group were cataton-ically channelling
our present, their future. From the start their work was overshadowed
by a deep foreboding, a sense of a future foreclosed, all certainties
dissolved, only growing gloom ahead. It has become increasingly clear
that 1979-80, the years with which the group will always be identified,
was a threshold moment - the time when a whole world (social
democratic, Fordist, industrial) became obsolete, and the contours of a
new world (neoliberal, consumerist, informatic) began to show
themselves. This is of course a retrospective judgement; breaks are rarely
experienced as such at the time. But the 70s exert a particular
fascination now that we are locked into the new world - a world that
Deleuze, using a word that would become associated with Joy Division,
called the ‘Society of Control’. The 70s is the time before the switch, a
time at once kinder and harsher than now. Forms of (social) security
then taken for granted have long since been destroyed, but vicious
prejudices that were then freely aired have become unacceptable. The
conditions that allowed a group like Joy Division to exist have evapo¬
rated; but so has a certain grey, grim texture of everyday life in Britain,
a country that seemed to have given up rationing only reluctantly.

By the early 2000s, the 70s was long enough ago to have become a
period setting for drama, and Joy Division were part of the scenery. This
was how they featured in Michael Winterbottom’s 24 Hour Party People
(2002). The group were little more than a cameo here, the first chapter
in the story of Factory records and its buffoon-genius impresario Tony
Wilson. Joy Division assumed centre stage in Anton Corbijn’s Control
(2007), but the film didn’t really connect. For those who knew the story,
it was a familiar trip; for those not already initiated, however, the film

didn’t do enough to convey the group’s sorcerous power. We were taken
through the story, but never drawn into the maelstrom, never made to
feel why any of it mattered. Perhaps this was inevitable. Rock depends
crucially on a particular body and a particular voice and the mysterious
relationship between the two. Control could never make good the loss of
Ian Curtis’s voice and body, and so ended up as arthouse karaoke
naturalism; the actors could simulate the chords, could ape Curtis’s
moves, but they couldn’t forge the vortical charisma, couldn’t muster the
unwitting necromantic art that transformed the simple musical
structures into a ferocious expressionism, a portal to the outside. For that
you need the footage of the group performing, the sound of the records.
Which is why, of the three films featuring the group, Grant Gee’s 2007
documentary, Joy Division, patched together from super-8 fragments, TV
appearances, new interviews and old images of postwar Manchester, was
most effective at transporting us back to those disappeared times. Gee’s
film begins with an epigraph from Marshall Berman’s All That Is Solid
Melts Into Air: The Experience Of Modernity: ‘To be modern is to find
ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy,
growth, transformation of ourselves and the world - and, at the same
time that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know,
everything we are.’ Where Control tried to conjure the presence of the
group, but left us only with a tracing, an outline, Joy Division is
organised around a vivid sense of loss. It is selfconsciously a study of a
time and a place, both of which are now gone. Joy Division is a roll call
of disappeared places and people - so many dead, already: not only
Curtis, but also the group’s manager Rob Gretton, their producer Martin
Hannett and of course Tony Wilson. The film’s coup, its most electric
moment, the sound of a dead man wandering in the land of the dead: a
scratchy old cassette recording of Ian Curtis being hypnotised into ‘a past
life regression’. I travelled far and wide through many different times. A
slow, slurred voice channelling something cold and remote. ‘How old are
you?’ ‘28’, an exchange made all the more chilling because we know that
Curtis would die at the age of 23.

Asylums with doors open wide

I didn’t hear Joy Division until 1982, so, for me, Curtis was always-

already dead. When I first heard them, aged 14, it was like that moment
in John Carpenter’s In the Mouth of Madness when Sutter Cane forces
John Trent to read the novel, the hyper-fiction, in which he is already
immersed: my whole future life, intensely compacted into those sound
images - Ballard, Burroughs, dub, disco, Gothic, antidepressants, psych
wards, overdoses, slashed wrists. Way too much stim to even begin to
assimilate. Even they didn’t understand what they were doing. How on
earth could I, then?

New Order, more than anyone else, were in flight from the mausoleum
edifice of Joy Division, and they had finally achieved severance by 1990.
The England world cup song, cavorting around with beery, leery Keith
Allen, a man who more than any other personifies the quotidian
masculinism of overground Brit bloke culture in the late 80s and 90s,
was a consummate act of desublimation. This, in the end, was what
Kodwo Eshun called the ‘price of escaping the anxiety of influence (the
influence of themselves)’. On Movement the group were still in post-
traumatic stress, frozen into a barely communicative trance (‘The noise
that surrounds me/ so loud in my head...’)

It was clear, in the best interviews the band ever gave - to Jon Savage,
a decade and a half after Curtis’s death - that they had no idea what
they were doing, and no desire to learn. Of Curtis’ disturbing-compelling
hyper-charged stage trance spasms and of his disturbing-compelling
catatonic downer words, they said nothing and asked nothing, for fear of
destroying the magic. They were unwitting necromancers who had
stumbled on a formula for channelling voices, apprentices without a
sorcerer. They saw themselves as mindless golems animated by Curtis’
vision(s). (Thus, when he died, they said that they felt they had lost their
eyes...)

Above all - and even if only because of audience reception - they
were more than a pop group, more than entertainment, that much is
obvious. We know all the words as if we wrote them ourselves, we
followed stray hints in the lyrics out to all sorts of darker chambers, and
listening to the albums now is like putting on a comfortable and familiar
set of clothes.... But who is this ‘we’? Well, it might have been the last
‘we’ that a whole generation of not-quite-men could feel a part of. There
was an odd universality available to Joy Division’s devotees (provided
you were male of course).

Provided you were male of course ... The Joy Division religion was, self¬
consciously, a boys’ thing. Deborah Curtis: ‘Whether it was intentional or
not, the wives and girlfriends had gradually been banished from all but
the most local of gigs and a curious male bonding had taken place. The
boys seemed to derive their fun from each other.’ (Deborah Curtis,
Touching from a Distance, 77) No girls allowed...

As Curtis’s wife, Deborah was barred from rock’s pleasure garden, and
could not pass into the cult of death that lay beyond the pleasure
principle. She was just left to clear up the mess.

If Joy Division were very much a boys’ group, their signature song,
‘She’s Lost Control’ saw Ian Curtis abjecting his own disease, the ‘holy
sickness’ of epilepsy, onto a female Other. Freud includes epileptic fits -
along, incidentally, with a body in the grip of sexual passion - as
examples of the unheimlich, the unhomely, the strangely familiar. Here
the organic is slaved to the mechanical rhythms of the inorganic; the
inanimate calls the tune, as it always does with Joy Division. ‘She’s Lost
Control’ is one of rock’s most explicit encounters with the mineral lure of
the inanimate. Joy Division’s icy-spined undeath disco sounds like it has
been recorded inside the damaged synaptic pathways of a brain of
someone undergoing a seizure, Curtis’ sepulchral, anhedonic vocals sent
back to him - as if they were the voice of an Other, or Others - in long,
leering expressionistic echoes that linger like acrid acid fog. ‘She’s Lost
Control’ traverses Poe-like cataleptic black holes in subjectivity, takes
flatline voyages into the land of the dead and back to confront the ‘edge
of no escape’, seeing in seizures little deaths (petil mals as petit morts)
which offer terrifying but exhilarating releases from identity, more
powerful than any orgasm.

In this colony

Try to imagine England in 1979 now...

Pre-VCR, pre-PC, pre-C4. Telephones far from ubiquitous (we didn’t
have one till around 1980, I think). The postwar consensus
disintegrating on black and white TV.

More than anyone else, Joy Division turned this dourness into a
uniform that self-consciously signified absolute authenticity; the
deliberately functional formality of their clothes seceding from punk’s

tribalised anti-Glamour, ‘depressives dressing for the Depression’
(Deborah Curtis). It wasn’t for nothing that they were called Warsaw
when they started out. But it was in this Eastern bloc of the mind, in this
slough of despond, that you could find working class kids who wrote
songs steeped in Dostoyevsky, Conrad, Kafka, Burroughs, Ballard, kids
who, without even thinking about it, were rigorous modernists who
would have disdained repeating themselves, never mind disinterring and
aping what had been done 20, 30 years ago (the 60s was a fading Pathe
newsreel in 1979).

Back in ‘79, Art Rock still had a relationship to the sonic
experimentation of the Black Atlantic. Unthinkable now, but White Pop
then was no stranger to the cutting edge, so a genuine trade was
possible. Joy Division provided the Black Atlantic with some sonic
fictions it could re-deploy - listen to Grace Jones’s extraordinary cover
of ‘She’s Lost Control’, or Sleazy D’s ‘I’ve Lost Control’, or even to Kanye
West’s 808s and Heartbreak (with its sleeve references to Saville’s ‘Blue
Monday’ cover design, and its echoes of Atmosphere and ‘In A Lonely
Place’). For all that, Joy Division’s relationship to black pop was much
more occluded than that of some of their peers. Postpunk’s break from
lumpen punk R and R consisted in large part in an ostentatiously flagged
return-reclaiming of Black Pop: funk and dub especially. There was none
of that, on the surface at least, with Joy Division.

But a group like PiL’s take on dub, now, sounds a little laborious, a
little literal, whereas, Joy Division, like The Fall, came off as a white
anglo equivalent of dub. Both Joy Division and The Fall were ‘black’ in
the priorities and economies of their sound: bass-heavy and rhythm-
driven. This was dub not as a form, but a methodology, a legitimation
for conceiving of sound-production as abstract engineering. But Joy
Division also had a relationship to another super-synthetic, artily
artificial ‘black’ sound: disco. Again, it was they, better than PiL, who
delivered the ‘Death Disco’ beat. As Jon Savage loves to point out, the
swarming syn-drums on ‘Insight’ seem to be borrowed from disco
records like Amy Stewart’s ‘Knock on Wood’.

The role in all this of Martin Hannett, a producer who needs to be
counted with the very greatest in pop, cannot be underestimated. It is
Hannett, alongside Peter Saville, the group’s sleeve designer, who
ensured that Joy Division were more Art than Rock. The damp mist of

insinuating uneasy listening Sound FX with which Hannett cloaked the
mix, together with Saville’s depersonalising designs, meant that the
group could be approached, not as an aggregation of individual
expressive subjects, but as a conceptual consistency. It was Hannett and
Saville who transmuted the stroppy neuromantics of Warsaw into
cyberpunks.

Day in/ Day out

Joy Division connected not just because of what they were, but when
they were. Mrs Thatcher just arrived, the long grey winter of
Reagonomics on the way, the Cold War still feeding our unconscious
with a lifetime’s worth of retina-melting nightmares.

JD were the sound of British culture’s speed comedown, a long slow
screaming neural shutdown. Since 1956, when Eden took amphetamines
throughout the Suez crisis, through the Pop of the 60s, which had been
kicked off by the Beatles going through the wall on uppers in Hamburg,
through punk, which consumed speed like there was no tomorrow,
Britain had been, in every sense, speeding. Speed is a connectivity drug,
a drug that made sense of a world in which electronic connections were
madly proliferating. But the comedown is vicious.

Massive serotonin depletion.

Energy crash.

Turn on your TV.

Turn down your pulse.

Turn away from it all.

It’s all getting

Too much

Melancholia was Curtis’ art form, just as psychosis was Mark E Smith’s.
Nothing could have been more fitting than that Unknown Pleasures began
with a track called ‘Disorder’, for the key to Joy Division was the
Ballardian spinal landscape, the connexus linking individual
psychopathology with social anomie. The two meanings of breakdown,
the two meanings of Depression. That was how Sumner saw it, anyhow.
As he explained to Savage, ‘There was a huge sense of community where
we lived. I remember the summer holidays when I was a kid: we would
stay up late and play in the street, and 12 o’clock at night there would
be old ladies, talking to each other. I guess what happened in the ‘60s
was that the council decided that it wasn’t very healthy, and something
had to go, and unfortunately it was my neighbourhood that went. We
were moved over the river to a towerblock. At the time I thought it was
fantastic; now of course I realise it was an absolute disaster. I’d had a
number of other breaks in my life. So when people say about the
darkness in Joy Division’s music, by age of 22, I’d had quite a lot of loss
in my life. The place where I used to live, where I had my happiest
memories, all of that had gone. All that was left was a chemical factory.
I realised then that I could never go back to that happiness. So there’s
this void.’

Dead end lives at the end of the 70s. There were Joy Division, Curtis
doing what most working class men still did, early marriage and a kid...

Feel it closing in

Sumner again: ‘When I left school and got a job, real life came as a
terrible shock. My first job was at Salford town hall sticking down
envelopes, sending rates out. I was chained in this horrible office: every
day, every week, every year, with maybe three weeks holiday a year.
The horror enveloped me. So the music of Joy Division was about the
death of optimism, of youth.’

A requiem for doomed youth culture. ‘Here are the young men/ the
weight on their shoulders,’ went the famous lines from ‘Decades’, on
Closer. The titles ‘New Dawn Fades’ and Unknown Pleasures could
themselves be referring to the betrayed promises of youth culture. Yet
what is remarkable about Joy Division is their total acquiescence in this
failure, the way in which, from the start, they set up an Antarctic camp

beyond the pleasure principle.

Set the controls for the heart of the black sun

What impressed and perturbed about JD was the fixatedness of their
negativity. Unremitting wasn’t the word. Yes, Lou Reed and Iggy and
Morrison and Jagger had dabbled in nihilism - but even with Iggy and
Reed that had been ameliorated by the odd moment of exhilaration, or
at least there had been some explanation for their misery (sexual
frustration, drugs). What separated Joy Division from any of their
predecessors, even the bleakest, was the lack of any apparent object-
cause for their melancholia. (That’s what made it melancholia rather
than melancholy, which has always been an acceptable, subtly sublime,
delectation for men to relish.) From its very beginnings, (Robert
Johnson, Sinatra) 20th-century Pop has been more to do with male (and
female) sadness than elation. Yet, in the case of both the bluesman and
the crooner, there is, at least ostensibly, a reason for the sorrow. Because
Joy Division’s bleakness was without any specific cause, they crossed the
line from the blue of sadness into the black of depression, passing into
the ‘desert and wastelands’ where nothing brings either joy or sorrow.
Zero affect.

No heat in Joy Division’s loins. They surveyed ‘the troubles and the
evils of this world’ with the uncanny detachment of the neurasthenic.
Curtis sang ‘I’ve lost the will to want more’ on ‘Insight’ but there was no
sense that there had been any such will in the first place. Give their
earliest songs a casual listen and you could easily mistake their tone for
the curled lip of spiky punk outrage, but, already, it is as if Curtis is not
railing against injustice or corruption so much as marshalling them as
evidence for a thesis that was, even then, firmly established in his mind.
Depression is, after all and above all, a theory about the world, about
life. The stupidity and venality of politicians (‘Leaders of Men’), the
idiocy and cruelty of war (‘Walked in Line’) are pointed to as exhibits in
a case against the world, against life, that is so overwhelming, so
general, that to appeal to any particular instance seems superfluous. In
any case, Curtis expects no more of himself than he does of others, he
knows he cannot condemn from a moral high ground: he ‘let them use
you/ for their own ends’ (‘Shadowplay’), he’ll let you take his place in a

showdown (‘Heart and Soul’).

That is why Joy Division can be a very dangerous drug for young men.
They seem to be presenting The Truth (they present themselves as doing
so). Their subject, after all, is depression. Not sadness or frustration,
rock’s standard downer states, but depression: depression, whose
difference from mere sadness consists in its claim to have uncovered The
(final, unvarnished) Truth about life and desire.

The depressive experiences himself as walled off from the lifeworld, so
that his own frozen inner life - or inner death - overwhelms everything;
at the same time, he experiences himself as evacuated, totally denuded,
a shell: there is nothing except the inside, but the inside is empty. For
the depressive, the habits of the former lifeworld now seem to be,
precisely, a mode of playacting, a series of pantomime gestures (‘a circus
complete with all fools’), which they are both no longer capable of
performing and which they no longer wish to perform - there’s no point,
everything is a sham.

Depression is not sadness, not even a state of mind, it is a
(neuro)philosophical (dis)position. Beyond Pop’s bipolar oscillation
between evanescent thrill and frustrated hedonism, beyond Jagger’s
Miltonian Mephistopheleanism, beyond Iggy’s negated carny, beyond
Roxy’s lounge lizard reptilian melancholy, beyond the pleasure principle
altogether, Joy Division were the most Schopenhauerian of rock groups,
so much so that they barely belonged to rock at all. Since they had so
thoroughly stripped out rock’s libidinal motor - it would be better to say
that they were, libidinally as well as sonically, anti-rock. Or perhaps, as
they thought, they were the truth of rock, rock divested of all illusions.
(The depressive is always confident of one thing: that he is without
illusions.) What makes Joy Division so Schopenhauerian is the
disjunction between Curtis’s detachment and the urgency of the music,
its implacable drive standing in for the dumb insatiability of the life-
Will, the Beckettian ‘I must go on’ not experienced by the depressive as
some redemptive positivity, but as the ultimate horror, the life-Will
paradoxically assuming all the loathsome properties of the undead
(whatever you do, you can’t extinguish it, it keeps coming back).

Accept like a curse an unlucky deal

JD followed Schopenhauer through the curtain of Maya, went outside
Burroughs’ Garden of Delights, and dared to examine the hideous
machineries that produce the world-as-appearance. What did they see
there? Only what all depressives, all mystics, always see: the obscene
undead twitching of the Will as it seeks to maintain the illusion that this
object, the one it is fixated upon NOW, this one, will satisfy it in a way
that all other objects thus far have failed to. Joy Division, with an
ancient wisdom (‘Ian sounded old, as if he had lived a lifetime in his
youth’ - Deborah Curtis), a wisdom that seems pre-mammalian, pre-
multicellular life, pre-organic, saw through all those reproducer ruses.
This is the ‘Insight’ that stopped fear in Curtis, the calming despair that
subdued any will to want more. JD saw life as the Poe of ‘The Conqueror
Worm’ had seen it, as Ligotti sees it: an automated marionette dance,
which ‘Through a circle that ever returneth in/ To the self-same spot’, an
ultra-determined chain of events that goes through its motions with
remorseless inevitability. You watch the pre-scripted film as if from
outside, condemned to watch the reels as they come to a close, brutally
taking their time.

A student of mine once wrote in an essay that they sympathise with
Schopenhauer when their football team loses. But the true
Schopenhauerian moments are those in which you achieve your goals,
perhaps realise your long-cherished heart’s desire - and feel cheated,
empty, no, more - or is it less? - than empty, voided. Joy Division
always sounded as if they had experienced one too many of those
desolating voidings, so that they could no longer be lured back onto the
merry-go-round. They knew that satiation wasn’t succeeded by tristesse,
it was itself, immediately, tristesse. Satiation is the point at which you
must face the existential revelation that you didn’t want really want
what you seemed so desperate to have, that your most urgent desires are
only a filthy vitalist trick to keep the show on the road. If you ‘can’t
replace the fear or the thrill of the chase’, why stir yourself to pursue yet
another empty kill? Why carry on with the charade?

Depressive ontology is dangerously seductive because, as the zombie
twin of a certain philosophical wisdom, it is half true. As the depressive
withdraws from the vacant confections of the lifeworld, he unwittingly
finds himself in concordance with the human condition so painstakingly
diagrammed by a philosopher like Spinoza: he sees himself as a serial

consumer of empty simulations, a junky hooked on every kind of
deadening high, a meat puppet of the passions. The depressive cannot
even lay claim to the comforts that a paranoiac can enjoy, since he
cannot believe that the strings are being pulled by any one. No flow, no
connectivity in the depressive’s nervous system. ‘Watch from the wings
as the scenes were replaying’, go the fatalistic lines in ‘Decades’, and
Curtis wrote with a depressive’s iron certainty about life as some pre¬
scripted film. His voice - from the very start terrifying in its fatalism, in
its acceptance of the worst - sounds like the voice of man who is already
dead, or who has entered an appalling state of suspended animation,
death-within-life. It sounds preternaturally ancient, a voice that cannot
be sourced back to any living being, still less to a young man barely in
his twenties.

A loaded gun won’t set you free - so you say

‘A loaded gun won’t set you free,’ Curtis sang on ‘New Dawn Fades’ from
Unknown Pleasures, but he didn’t sound convinced. ‘After pondering over
the words to ‘New Dawn Fades’,’ Deborah Curtis wrote, ‘I broached the
subject with Ian, trying to make him confirm that they were only lyrics
and bore no resemblance to his true feelings. It was a one-sided
conversation. He refused to confirm or deny any of the points raised and
he walked out of the house. I was left questioning myself instead, but did
not feel close enough to anyone else to voice my fears. Would he really
have married me knowing that he still intended to kill himself in his
early twenties? Why father a child when you have no intention of being
there to see it grow up? Had I been so oblivious to his unhappiness that
he had been forced to write about it?’ (Touching from a Distance: Ian
Curtis and Joy Division, Faber&Faber, 1995, p85) The male lust for death
had always been a subtext in rock, but before Joy Division it had been
smuggled into rock under libidinous pretexts, a black dog in wolf’s
clothing - Thanatos cloaked as Eros - or else it had worn pantomime
panstick. Suicide was a guarantee of authenticity, the most convincing of
signs that you were 4 Real. Suicide has the power to transfigure life,
with all its quotidian mess, its conflicts, its ambivalences, its
disappointments, its unfinished business, its ‘waste and fever and heat’ -
into a cold myth, as solid, seamless and permanent as the ‘marble and

stone’ that Peter Saville would simulate on the record sleeves and Curtis
would caress in the lyrics to ‘In a Lonely Place’. (‘In a Lonely Place’ was
Curtis’ song, but it was recorded by a New Order in a zombie state of
post-traumatic disorder after Curtis’ death. It sounds like Curtis is an
interloper at his own funeral, mourning his own death: ‘how I wish you
were here with me now’.)

The great debates over Joy Division - were they fallen angels or
ordinary blokes? Were they Fascists? Was Curtis’ suicide inevitable or
preventable? - all turn on the relationship between Art and Life. We
should resist the temptation to be Lorelei-lured by either the Aesthete-
Romantics (in other words, us, as we were) or the lumpen empiricists.
The Aesthetes want the world promised by the sleeves and the sound, a
pristine black and white realm unsullied by the grubby compromises and
embarrassments of the everyday. The empiricists insist on just the
opposite: on rooting the songs back in the quotidian at its least elevated
and, most importantly, at its least serious. Tan was a laugh, the band
were young lads who liked to get pissed, it was all a bit of fun that got
out of hand...’ It’s important to hold onto both of these Joy Divisions -
the Joy Division of Pure Art, and the Joy Division who were ‘just a laff’ -
at once. For if the truth of Joy Division is that they were Lads, then Joy
Division must also be the truth of Laddism. And so it would appear:
beneath all the red-nosed downer-fuelled jollity of the past two decades,
mental illness has increased some 70% amongst adolescents. Suicide
remains one of the most common sources of death for young males.

‘I crept into my parents’ house without waking anyone and was asleep
within seconds of my head touching the pillow. The next sound I heard
was “This is the end, beautiful friend. This is the end, my only friend,
the end. I’ll never look into your eyes again...” Surprised at hearing the
Doors’ ‘The End’, I struggled to rouse myself. Even as I slept I knew it
was an unlikely song for Radio One on a Sunday morning. But there was
no radio - it was all a dream.’ (Touching From a Distance, p!32)

Smiley’s Game: Tinker , Tailor , Soldier , Spy

Film Quarterly, Vol. 65, No. 2, (2011)

What is the allure of George Smiley? Why does Smiley beguile even left-
wing viewers who, on the face of it, might be expected to see him as at
one point in John le Carre’s 1974 novel he describes himself: ‘the very
archetype of a flabby Western liberal’? The enigma of Smiley’s appeal is
one of many spectres that haunts Tomas Alfredson’s movie adaptation of
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. The ghost that most insistently refuses to be
exorcised is the 1979 BBC TV version, rightly remembered as one of the
greatest ever British television series. Re-adapting a novel after so
accomplished a version is risky, especially when you have a mere two
hours to play with, as opposed to the series’ more unhurried five.

Pace - and pacing, as in moving around restively while waiting - were
central to the coiling tension of the TV series, which caught the crab-like
convolutions and slowly interlocking rhythms of le Carre’s narrative
exceptionally well. The limitations of television production actually
benefited the sense of expansiveness. Sets and action were minimal; the
drama was often about faces, and about Alec Guinness’s face in
particular, which could suggest a lifetime of regret with the slightest
wince. Guinness’s performance was a masterclass in concision and
nuance - not words one would always associate with Gary Oldman, cast
(emphatically against type) as Smiley in the new Tinker Tailor.

When a novel creates as rich a mythworld as le Carre’s does, no single
adaptation will ever completely exhaust it. There is always the
possibility of uncovering hitherto underexplored angles and for those of
us who are fans of the novel, a strong new version would have had the
benefit of liberating the book (and Smiley) from the Guinness portrayal -
a prospect that might explain some of le Carre’s enthusiasm for the film.
Le Carre has said he felt that Guinness took Smiley from him, making
him unable to write the character anymore. When it was announced that
this was Alfredson’s next directing project after the success of Let the

Right One In (2008), hopes for something special were justifiably high.
His brilliant reworking of vampire fiction had a sense of melancholy,
violent lives lived in secret that could have carried over most effectively
to the closed-world intrigues of British spying. It is thus all the more
disappointing that this new Tinker Tailor fails to compellingly reimagine
the story, and central to its failure is the film’s inability to make Smiley
alluring.

In the novel le Carre reckoned with the sensational exposures that had
both traumatised and titillated British society in the 1960s when Soviet
double agents Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, and Kim Philby were
revealed to be operating right at the heart of the intelligence
establishment. The book begins when Smiley is called out of retirement
to search for a deep-cover mole - it was in fact le Carre who popularised
this term - in the Secret Intelligence Service (otherwise known as MI6).
Tinker Tailor follows Smiley’s circuitous pursuit and exposure of the
traitor, who is ultimately revealed to be Smiley’s friend and rival Bill
Haydon - one of many men to have affairs with Smiley’s semi-estranged
wife, Ann. The narrative is suffused with what Paul Gilroy has called
‘postcolonial melancholia’. Smiley, Haydon, and their contemporaries -
notably Jim Prideaux, the former head of the ‘scalphunters’ section, shot
in the bungled operation that ultimately leads to the mole being
uncovered, and Connie Sachs, the head of intelligence, dismissed when
she comes uncomfortably close to the truth - have watched all the
expectations born of imperial privilege slowly disappearing. ‘Trained to
Empire, trained to rule the waves. All gone, all taken away,’ Sachs
laments (Pan Books, 1979, 102).

Postcolonial melancholia is fed more by hostility towards the US than
it is by fear of the Soviets - Haydon and Smiley’s boss, the irascible
Control, are united in their loathing of Americans. When Control is
maneuvered out of his position by the ambitious (and very pro-US)
Percy Alleline, this seems to consolidate the sense of irreversible decline
which hangs over the novel. England’s glory lies in the past; the future is
American. In the novel and its sequels, it is clear that Smiley’s victory is
temporary; his world is on the brink of disappearing.

Smiley brings to mind English archetypes both ancient and modern.
What is the perpetually cuckolded Smiley, returning to save his ailing
kingdom, if not a Cold War King Arthur? Yet this is Arthur done in the

style of T. S. Eliot’s Prufrock, whose famous self-characterization as ‘an
attendant lord’ applies all too acutely to le Carre’s character as well:
‘Deferential, glad to be of use, / Politic, cautious, and meticulous; / Full
of high sentence, but a bit obtuse; / At times, indeed, almost ridiculous -
/ Almost, at times, the Fool’ (‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,’ The
Complete Poems and Plays ofT. S. Eliot, Faber and Faber, 1969, 16).

While in some respects a pathologically self-blinding figure, Smiley
shares some of Prufrock’s self-consciousness; when, in a scene that is
powerfully played out in both the BBC and the film version, Smiley
recalls his one face-to-face encounter with his counterpart, the Soviet
spy chief Karla, he calls himself a ‘fool.’ Crucially, however, he adds that
he would rather be his kind of fool than Karla’s.

When Smiley recounts the meeting with Karla to his younger protege
Peter Guillam, he reproaches himself for having talked too much on that
memorable occasion in an Indian jail cell. Karla wins the encounter by
never speaking, by transforming himself into the blank screen that
Smiley cannot on this occasion become - which makes it all the easier
for Smiley to fall into the trap of projecting his own anxieties and
preoccupations onto the impassive Karla. In the novel, Smiley affects to
disdain the psychoanalytic language of ‘projection’ but, tellingly, he
cannot resist using these terms to describe himself; appropriately, for in
the normal run of things Smiley’s art consists in cultivating a particular
kind of silence - not the mere absence of chatter, but the authoritative,
probing silence of the psychoanalyst. The face can’t give anything away,
yet at the same time it has to invite confidence. Those who don’t want to
talk must be drawn into confiding. And isn’t that a large part of Smiley’s
appeal to those of us from a more adolescent, more compulsively
loquacious time: his grownup capacity to engender respect, and to
quietly solicit our need for his approval? Speaking after a London critics’
screening of Tinker Tailor in September, Oldman said that, by contrast
with the Guinness version, no-one would want to hug his Smiley. Yet the
suggestion that we would want to hug Guinness’s Smiley is absurd.
Surely what we find ourselves craving from Smiley is a word, a gesture,
the merest hint of approbation. But it is a mistake to see the avuncular
seductions of Guinness’s performance as if they were in opposition to the
ruthlessness which Oldman emphasises in his rendition of Smiley, for
Smiley’s merciless, unblinking hunting down of his prey depends upon

this very capacity to draw people out.

Oldman’s reading of Smiley’s blankness is far less sophisticated than
Guinness’s. Le Carre’s Smiley is famously corpulent; Oldman’s is angular,
stiff, dyspeptic. We can’t imagine ever wanting to confide in him.
Oldman’s Smiley is simply an inexpressive mask: forbidding, impassive,
unyielding. It is as if Oldman is giving us his shallow reading of his
grandparents’ generation: aloof, distanced, bottled-up. They kept it all
inside; they didn’t know how to have a good time. For Oldman, Smiley’s
restraint plays as repression and a certain malicious self-satis-faction -
his silence is a simple lack of demonstrativeness, or a merely inverted
demonstrativeness.

Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today, le Carre himself identified Oldman’s
performance of repression as one of the highlights of this new version.
‘You couldn’t really imagine Alec [Guinness] having a sex life,’ he said.
‘You couldn’t imagine a kiss on the screen with Alec, not one that you
believed in. Whereas Oldman has quite obviously a male sexuality that
he represses, like all his other feelings, in this story. Oldman is a Smiley
waiting patiently to explode. I think the air of frustration, of solitude
that he is able to convey is something that really does take me back to a
novel I wrote 37 years ago.’ Sadly, this remark suggests less a new way
of seeing Smiley than a certain coarsening of understanding brought
about, no doubt, by the dissemination of a therapeutic wisdom which
insists that the truth of a character is to be found in their (narrowly
defined) sexuality.

To say that Smiley is waiting patiently to explode is a very curious
take on a character defined rather by a lack of heat. When Oldman
shouts at Haydon ‘what are you then, Bill?’ at the climax of the film, this
is an abandonment of emotional decorum quite out of keeping with
Smiley’s character, for whom the English ruling-class habit of
transposing aggression into the chill of superficially polite discourse
comes as second nature. Anger is one of the emotions that the Smiley of
the novel feels at the moment of Haydon’s exposure, yet it is not the
dominant one: Smiley

saw with painful clarity an ambitious man born to the big canvas,

brought up to rule, divide and conquer, whose vision and vanities all

were fixed, like Percy’s, upon the world’s game; for whom the reality
was a poor island with scarcely a voice that would carry across the
water. Thus Smiley felt not only disgust; but, despite all that the
moment meant to him, a surge of resentment against the institutions
he was supposed to be protecting’ (297).

Thus, the tone of triumphalism with which the film ends - Smiley
gloriously restored to his place of honour in MI6 - strikes another false
note.

The Smiley in Alfredson’s film is a figure who is far less queer than the
Smiley of the novel or the television series. Homosexual desire is
widespread in Tinker Tailor - most notably in Prideaux’s betrayed love
for the flamboyantly polysexual Haydon - but there is no suggestion that
Smiley shared these passions. The Smiley of novel and series is queer in
the more radical sense that a ‘normal’ sexuality cannot be assigned to
him. Smiley’s is not a fluid, indeterminate sexuality like, say, that of
Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley. His perversity is renunciation itself. At
the preview, Oldman referred approvingly to le Carre’s comments on
Guinness’s lack of sexuality; but he also characterised Smiley as
masochistic (repeatedly subjecting himself to adulterous humiliations)
and sadistic (the way he pursues his prey goes far beyond professional
duty). Yet the idea that Smiley is sadomasochistic quite clearly
contradicts the idea that he is repressed. For sadomasochism entails
enjoyment, not repression. Far from being repressed, it’s clear that
Smiley is driven - driven by something which will not allow him to ever
recline into happy retirement any more than he could settle into the
pleasures of conjugal life, were they available to him.

From his earliest appearances in le Carre’s fiction - in the novels Call
for the Dead and A Murder of Quality - Smiley is on the edge of things. In
most of the novels which feature Smiley, he rarely appears as officially a
member of MI6. He is called out of retirement, or pretending to be
retired; and when, after Tinker Tailor, he is not only restored to the
organization but made chief, it is in a temporary caretaker capacity. One
of the paradoxes of Smiley’s character is that he seems to stand for the
solidity - and stolidity - ascribed to a certain model of Englishness, yet
he is himself an outsider, an interloper, a voyeur. This is the spy’s

vocation, and le Carre repeatedly insists on it, nowhere more
passionately than in the bitter outburst of the agent Alec Leamas at the
end of The Spy who Came in from the Cold, so memorably performed by
Richard Burton in the 1965 film adaptation.

‘What do you think spies are, moral philosophers measuring
everything they do against the word of God or Karl Marx? They’re not,
they’re just a bunch of seedy, squalid bastards like me,’ Burton’s Leamas
tells his lover, Liz, after it has been revealed that they were pawns in a
complex plot hatched by Control and Smiley. It is the beyond-good-and-
evil agent, the one who acts without performing complex moral
calculations, the one who cannot belong to the ‘normal’ world, who
allows ordinary folk to sleep easily. Yet duty is only the pretext; there is
also the matter of the deep libidinal lure of this no-man’s-land for
outsiders like Leamas and Smiley. Like writers, they listen and observe;
like actors, they play parts.

But, for spies, there are no limits to these roles; one cannot simply step
out of them and return to the warm, because everything - including
inner life itself, all its wounds and private shames - starts to feel like
cover, a series of props. There is a revelatory passage towards the end of
the second Smiley novel, A Murder of Quality, first published in 1962. At
the end of the novel - a strange whodunit thriller - Smiley confronts the
murderer, but, as in the later confrontation with Karla, he ends up
talking about himself:

And there are some of us - aren’t there? - who are nothing, who are
so labile that we astound ourselves; we’re the chameleons. I read a
story once about a poet who bathed himself in cold fountains so that
he could recognise his own existence in the contrast of it...The people
like that, they can’t feel anything inside them: no pleasure or pain, no
love or hate...They have to feel that cold water. Without it, they’re
nothing. The world sees them as showmen, fantasists, liars, as
sensualists perhaps, not for what they are: the living dead (Coronet,
1994, 174).

There is a clear implication in this slide from first person (‘some of us’)
to third person (‘people like that’): the Cold Warrior Smiley is himself

one of the ‘living dead.’ In psychoanalytic terms, Smiley is less a
‘sadomasochist’ than an obsessional neurotic. (Lacan in fact argues that
the question posed by the obsessional is ‘am I alive or am I dead?’) At
the end of Smiley’s People, when Smiley has defeated Karla and has the
possibility of winning Ann back, Smiley is very far from being elated.
There is little sense of this in Oldman’s Smiley: his ‘sadomasochism’ is
too crude to approximate the baroque mechanisms of self-decep-tions
and self-torturings which govern Smiley’s psyche. Yet another false note
is struck in Alfredson’s film when Smiley sees Ann being embraced by
Haydon at the MI6 Christmas party; he throws himself against the wall
in a spasm of agony. In other respects, the party scene adds something
which wasn’t there in the BBC version, a sense of the camaraderie within
the department, but it is hard to imagine Smiley engaging in so public
and so spontaneous display of emotion. More troublingly, to suggest that
Smiley would straightforwardly feel pain when confronted with Ann’s
infidelities is to betray the very idea that he is masochistic. When
confronted about Ann in the novel and TV adaptation, Smiley’s preferred
pose is one of weary resig-nation; but this conceals the secret satisfaction
that he experiences in Ann playing her assigned role as impossible
object. But where the masochist would organise his enjoyment around
this impossible object, for Smiley, the function of Ann’s unattainability is
to keep her at a safe distance. His enjoyment is not organised around
Ann - or sexuality - at all, and when she is safely unattainable she
cannot trouble him.

Unlike in the TV series, we never see the faces of either Ann or Karla,
Smiley’s other Other, in the film. This rightly suggests that both figures
are at least partially absent for Smiley, filled in with his fantasies. But
what’s missing is an account of the way that Smiley fills in these fantasy
screens, and any sense of discrepancy between the fantasy figures that
Smiley projects and their real-life counterparts. In the film, Smiley
cannot remember what Karla looked like; in the novel he gives a
detailed description of his adversary. Defined externally by his struggle
against Karla, Smiley’s internal struggle consists of his necessarily
thwarted attempts to refuse any identification with his Soviet
counterpart. Smiley’s attempts to distance himself from the ‘fanatic’
Karla, his attempts to position himself outside politics itself, are the
exemplary gestures of a very English ideology, which appeals to a preor

post-political notion of ‘common humanity.’ Yet, ironically, what Smiley
and Karla have in common is their inhumanity, their exile from any sort
of ‘normal’ world of human passions. When they meet in Delhi, Smiley is
baffled, frustrated but also fascinated by Karla’s refusal of the appeal,
unable to fathom a commitment to an abstract ideology, especially when
- in Smiley’s view - it has self-evidently failed. ‘The irony in le Carre’s
fiction,’ writes Tony Barley, ‘is that a sound basis for commitment is
always either sought or mourned for its absence, and yet when genuine
commitment appears (invariably in communism) it is treated as
incomprehensible. Communism becomes fanaticism, not a strength but a
weakness’ (Taking Sides: The Fiction of John le Carre (Open University
Press, 1986, 95). Barley rightly argues that Smiley cannot be read as a
cipher for liberal ideology because the incoherencies and impasses of his
own position are never resolved. Behind the manifest content of Smiley’s
entreaties to Karla - come and join us, give up your dead generalities,
enjoy the particularities of the lived world - the latent message is that all
Britain has to offer is disillusionment, the impossibility of belief. (Smiley
tells Guillam that ‘fanaticism’ will be the undoing of Karla: in fact, when
Karla is defeated in Smiley’s People, it is because of his failure to be
sufficiently ‘fanatical’.) Very little of this comes out in Alfredson’s
depoliticised film, in which Smiley is simply a wronged hero who
ultimately attains justice, Haydon is simply a traitor, and communism is
simply an exotic period reference. The nickname for MI6, ‘The Circus,’ in
fact openly acknowledges the aberrant enjoyment available to those who
have crossed into this fictional Cold World. The multivalent origin of the
nickname - in addition to hinting at the way the spies play their deadly
game in a spirit of mordant, laconic cynicism, it is also a near homonym
of ‘service,’ and a play on the location in the novel of MI6’s offices:
Cambridge Circus, central London - tells you a great deal about the
world in which Smiley operates. Much of the power of the television
version derived from the way it threw us directly into this world.
Guinness’s Smiley incarnated a model of BBC paternalism: he guided us
through his world, but he had high expectations of us. Very little was
explained - we had to pick up le Carre’s invented nomenclature
(scalphunters, lamplighters) on the fly. The work slang invoked the
exoticism of a rarefied form of labour, while also suggesting the
routinisation of espionage for those involved in it on a daily basis. It all

contributed to the feeling that the Circus was a lived-in world. One of
the major problems with Alfredson’s Tinker Tailor, by contrast, is that its
world doesn’t feel lived-in at all. Gratifyingly, the film does not talk
down to audiences; just as in the TV series, we are required to orientate
ourselves in the Circus’s intrigues. But the combination of Oldman’s
inexpressiveness and the compression brought about by having to tell so
complicated a story in such a short time results in something that is
strangely uninvolving. The film is almost entirely lacking in tension or
paranoia; in the TV series, the scene where Guillam steals a file from the
Circus is almost unbearably tense. In the film, the same scene plays out
in a curiously distanced way. Then there is the question of period, and
the film’s striving to create a sense of London in the 1970s. I was too
often reminded of Life on Mars, which evoked the decade with a series of
clumsily placed period signifiers. As with Life on Mars, much of
Alfedson’s film looks like a 1970s theme park. Rather than discreetly
constituting a period background, branded goods (Trebor mints, Ajax
household cleaner) are distractingly pushed to the foreground of our
attention, details that we are invited to approvingly note. But where the
details matter, this new version is lacking. Eras produce certain voices,
certain faces. What’s missing in Alfredson’s version is something like the
grain of the 1970s. Too often, the actors seem like 21st-century
moisturised metrosexuals in 1970s drag - and bad drag at that.
Presented with photographs of people from the 1970s, the cliched but
accurate observation is that people looked so much older then. But the
preposterously fresh-faced likes of Benedict Cumberbatch (who plays
Guillam) and Tom Hardy (in the role of rogue agent Ricki Tarr) aren’t
nearly weathered enough to convince as 1970s secret agents. The skin,
the hair are too good. The faces are without the sallow, harrowed,
harried look that Michael Jayston and Hywel Bennett brought to the
roles in the 1970s production; their voices unable to convey any sense of
the bitter and brutalising effects of the spy’s life. John Hurt’s Control, at
least, has the right weatherbeaten complexion and cynical-playful
cadences. Accents are a severe problem in the film. Oldman plays Smiley
as generically posh, but at the same time he sounds like no one you’ve
ever heard; at points there’s an oddly Scottish lilt to his accent. The
accent of Toby Jones’s Percy Alleline, meanwhile - played as Scottish in
keeping with the novel - keeps drifting southward. Kathy Burke is

hopelessly miscast as Connie Sachs: she sounds like a schoolgirl taking
on the part of a posh woman in the school play. The problem here isn’t
just one of authenticity; it’s that the wayward accents once again
undermine the sense of a lived-in world. There is too much conspicuous
effort going into this 1970s simulation. Throughout, you can practically
hear Gary Oldman straining to hold back the Estuary English. In the BBC
version, the Circus was an unprepossessing space - functional, dreary
corridors leading into cramped offices. In Alfredson’s version, Control’s
office looks more like something from a nightclub than what you would
expect to see in MI6. One wants to escape the 1970s version, but
Alfredson doesn’t give us nearly enough to do that. There is much that is
different, but nothing that is strong enough to displace the television
version in the memory. The casting of Colin Firth as Haydon, however,
at least allows us to see the character in a different way. The face of Ian
Richardson - who would go onto play the Tory grandee and Machiavel
in the BBC television series House of Cards - provided a grey-eminence
image of British power in the 1970s and 80s. I don’t know who it was
who said that Colin Firth looks like the midway point between the
current British prime minister David Cameron and his deputy Nick
Clegg, but the observation is very astute. The face of the British
Establishment no longer has the hawk-like puckishness of Richardson; it
has the rumpled, casual youthfulness of Firth. One of the major problems
with Alfredson’s film is that it assumes the ruling values of the neoliberal
world governed by youth and consumerism (isn’t this what ‘American’
codes for in the Smiley novels?). Richard Sennett has argued that the
chronic short-termism of neoliberal culture has resulted in a ‘corrosion
of character’ (The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of
Work in the New Capitalism, W. W. Norton, 1999): a destruction of
permanence, loyalty, and the capacity to plan. Isn’t Smiley’s allure tied
up with the possibilities of character itself? In the 1970s, Smiley showed
up all the inadequacies, squalid compromises, and subterranean
brutalities of social democracy. Then, Smiley’s doubts and his failings
prompted us to imagine a better world even as we struggled to resist
Smiley’s blankly and perversely comforting avuncularity; now, when
that better world seems if anything further away, it takes all our effort to
resist the lure of nostalgia for the social-democratic world of which
Smiley was both the conscience and the dirty secret.

The Past is an Alien Planet: The First and
Last Episodes of Life on Mars

k-punk post January 10, 2006

Life On Mars is symptomatic enough to be interesting. Symptomatic of
what? Well, of a culture that has lost confidence not just that the future
will be good, but that any sort of future is possible. And also: Life On
Mars suggests that one of the chief resources of recent British culture -
the past - is reaching the point of exhaustion.

The scenario is that Sam Tyler (John Simm), a detective from 2006, is
hit by a car and finds himself back in 1973. The game that you can’t
help playing as you watch is: how convincing is the simulation of 1973?
You’re constantly on the look out for period anachronisms. The answer is
that it isn’t very convincing. But not because of anachronisms. The
problem is that this is a 73 that doesn’t feel lived in. The actual post¬
psychedelic, quasi-Eastern Bloc seediness of the 70s is unretrievable;
kitsch wallpaper and bell bottoms are transformed instantly into Style
quotations the moment the camera falls upon them.

(There must be some technical reason - maybe it’s the film stock they
use - that accounts for why British TV is no longer capable of rendering
any sense of a lived-in world. No matter what is filmed, everything
always looks as if it has been thickly, slickly painted in gloss, like it’s all
a corporate video. That remains my problem with the new Dr Who as it
happens: the contemporary British scenes look like a theme park, a very
stagey stage-set, too well lit.)

‘Look Out There’s a Thief About’ public information films on black and
white TV, Open University lecturers with preposterous moustaches and
voluminous collars, the test card... Every thing is so iconic, and the thing
with icons, after all, is that they evoke nothing. The icon is the very
opposite of the Madeleine, Chris Marker’s name - rhyming Hitchcock
and Proust - for those totemic triggers that suddenly abduct you into the
past. The point being that the Madeleine can only manage this time-

snatching function because it has avoided museumification and
memorialisation, stayed out of the photographs, been forgotten in a
corner. Hearing T-Rex now doesn’t remind you of 73, it reminds you of
nostalgia programmes about 1973.

And isn’t part of our problem that every cultural object from 1963 on
has been so thoroughly, forensically, mulled over that nothing can any
longer transport us back? (A problem of digital memory: Baudrillard
observes somewhere that computers don’t really remember because they
lack the ability to forget.)

k-punk post , April 13, 2007

In the end, the science fiction elements of Life On Mars consisted solely
in an ontological hesitation: is this real or not? As such, Life On Mars fell
squarely into Todorov’s definition of the Fantastic as that which
hesitates between the Uncanny (that which can ultimately be explained
naturalistically) and the Marvellous (that which can only be accounted
for in supernatural terms). The predicament that Life On Mars explored
was: is Sam Tyler in a coma, and the whole 1970s world in which he is
lost some kind of unconscious confabulation? Or has he, by some means
not yet understood, been transported back into the real 1973? The show
maintained the equivocation until the end (the final episode was
ambivalent to the point of being cryptic).

Simm has wryly observed that the show’s central conceit lets the
production off the hook. If Tyler was in a coma, then any of Life On
Mars’s historical inaccuracies could be explained away as gaps in the
character’s recollections of the period. No doubt the enjoyment of Life
On Mars derived from its imperfect recollection, not of 1973 itself, but of
the television of the 1970s. The programme was mitigated nostalgia, I
Love 1973 as a cop show. I say cop show, because it is clear that the SF
elements of Life On Mars were little more than pretexts; the show was a
meta-cop show rather than meta-SF. The time travel conceit permitted
the showing of representations which would otherwise be unacceptable,
and beneath the framing ontological question (is this real or not?), there
was a question about desire and politics: do we want this to be real?

As the avatar of the present, Sam Tyler became the bad conscience of
the 70s cop show, whose discontent with the past permitted us to enjoy

it again. Simm, as the modern, enlightened ‘good cop’, was less the anti¬
type of antediluvian ‘bad cop’ Gene Hunt than the postmodern disavowal
which made possible our enjoyment of Hunt’s invective and violence.
Hunt, played by Philip Glenister, became the show’s real star, beloved of
the tabloids who adored quoting his streams of abuse, carefully
constructed by the writers so that they could come across as comic
rather than inflammatory. Hunt’s ‘no-nonsense policing’ was presented
with enough ‘grit’ to make us wince, but never so much violence that it
would invoke disgust. (In this respect, the programme was the cultural
equivalent of a blow to a suspect that would not show up under later
medical examination.)

Undoubtedly, although perhaps unintentionally, the show’s ultimate
message was reactionary; in the end, rather than Tyler educating Hunt,
it was he would come to an accommodation with Hunt’s methods. When,
in the final episode, Tyler is faced with a choice between betraying Hunt
or staying loyal (at this point in the narrative, it appears that Tyler’s
betrayal of Hunt is the requisite price Tyler must pay in order to return
to 2007), this also became a choice between 1973 and the present day
that amounted to a decision, not about collar lengths or other cultural
preferences, but about policing styles. Audience sympathy is managed
such that, however much we disapprove of Hunt, we are never supposed
to lose faith in him, so that Tyler’s betrayal seemed far worse than any of
Hunt’s many misdemeanours. Tyler’s (apparent) return to 2007
underscores this by presenting the modern environment as sterile,
drearily worthy, ultimately far less real than the rough justice of Hunt’s
era. Modern wisdom (‘how can you maintain the law by breaking the
law?’) is set against Hunt’s renegade-heroic identification of himself with
the law (‘I am the law, so how can I break it?’) The deep libidinal appeal
of Hunt derives from his impossible duality as upholder of the Law and
he who enjoys unlimited jouissance. The two faces of the Father, the
stern lawgiver and Pere Jouissance, resolved: the perfect figure of
reactionary longing, a charismatic embodiment of everything allegedly
forbidden to us by ‘political correctness’.

‘Can The World Be as Sad as It Seems?’:
David Peace and his Adapters

David Peace’s four Red Riding novels were acts of exorcism and
excavation of the near-past, a bloody riposte to I Love The 1970s
clipshow nostalgia. They stalk the West Yorkshire that Peace grew up in,
transforming real events - the framing and intimidation of Stefan Kisco;
the incompetent police operation to catch the Yorkshire Ripper - into
background for brutal and unrelenting fictions that possess an
apocalyptic lyricism.

Peace has always been dogged by comparisons with James Ellroy.
There’s no doubt that encountering Ellroy liberated something in Peace,
but in the end Peace is the better writer. Peace has called the experience
of reading Ellroy’s White Jazz his ‘Sex Pistols moment’. But Peace builds
upon what Ellroy achieved much in the way that the postpunk groups
leapt into the space that the Pistols had blown open. Peace extrapolates
a pulp modernist poetics from Ellroy’s experiments in telegraphic
compression, and while Ellroy’s pugilistic prose has a pump-action
amphetamine drive, Peace’s writing is hypnotic and oneiric; its
incantatory repetitions delaying and veiling plot revelations rather than
rushing headlong towards resolution. Despite presenting seemingly
similar worlds - in which the police are routinely corrupt, journalists are
venal and co-optable, and the wealthy are vampiric exploiters - their
political orientations are very different. Ellroy is a Hobbesian
conservative, who evinces a macho pragmatism that accepts violence,
exploitation and betrayal as inevitable. The same phenomena are
oppressively omnipresent in Peace’s world, but there is no sense of
acceptance: instead, his novels read like howls of agony and calls for
retribution, divine or otherwise.

Peace, who has said that he aimed to produce a Crime fiction which is
no longer entertainment, has written Crime works that are hauntological
in a triple sense. The Crime genre is of course well suited to explore the
(moral, existential, theological) problems posed by what Quentin

Meillassoux called ‘odious deaths’: the deaths ‘of those who have met
their end prematurely, whose death is not the proper conclusion of a life
but its violent curtailment’; and as they moved away from the uneasy
combination of fanciful genre trappings, period signifiers, Angry Young
Man homage and brutality that characterised 1974, the novels of the Red
Riding Quartet were simultaneously drawn towards actuality and
theology, as if the proximity of the one entailed the other. Readers are
put into the position of spectral mourners by the voices of those who
have died odiously, the Ripper’s victims, heard in the visionary
‘Transmissions’ which preface each of the chapters in 1980, sections
which combine the actual (gleaned from reportage and biography) with
the spectral.

The novels are hauntological in another sense, a sense that is closer to
the way in which we have used it in relation to music, but not quite the
same. Peace is not at all interested in the problems of degraded memory
which preoccupy The Caretaker, Burial or Basinski. His is a past without
crackle, rendered in the first person and in a tense that is very nearly
present. The occlusions in the narrative are due, not to faulty recording
devices or memory disorders (cultural or personal) but to the self¬
blindings of his characters, who see themselves (and the events of which
they are a part) only through a glass darkly. In the end, everything -
narrative, intelligibility - succumbs to total murk; as the characters
begin to disassociate, it becomes difficult to know what is happening, or
what has happened; at a certain point, it is unclear as to whether we
have crossed over into the land of the dead.

Hunter, the senior Manchester detective assigned to investigate the
West Yorkshire police force in 1980, finds himself caught in a world in
which things don’t add up; they don’t fit together. It’s a Gnostic terrain. The
Gnostics thought that the world was made of a corrupt matter
characterised by heavy weight and impenetrable opacity: a murky,
muddy mire in which fallen angels - one of the persistent images in the
Red Riding books - are trapped. There is no question of Hunter, or
solicitor John Piggott in 1983 - or even Peace - being able to completely
illuminate what has happened. This is a world in which, as Tony Grisoni,
the screenwriter who adapted the novels for Channel 4, puts it,
‘narratives disappear into the dark’.

The libidinal orientation towards the past is also markedly different in

the case of Peace and sonic hauntology: whereas hauntological music
has emphasised the unexplored potentials prematurely curtailed in the
periods it invokes, Peace’s novels are driven by the unexpiated suffering
of Yorkshire at the end of the 70s. And Peace’s writing is also
hauntological in its intuition that particular places are stained by
particular occurrences (and vice versa). As he has insisted in many
interviews, it is no accident that Sutcliffe was the Yorkshire Ripper.
Peace’s books are avowedly anti-nostalgic, the anti-Life On Mars, with its
ambivalence towards police brutality (and its media representation).
There is no such vindication in Peace’s novels, no suppressed yearning
for a time in which coppers could beat suspects with impunity. After all,
it is corruption, rather than criminality per se, that is the focus of the
Red Riding Quartet.

Music in Peace’s books functions as a hauntological trigger. He’s
remarked that he uses music, including music he doesn’t like, to take
him back to the feel, the grain, of a period. Musical references are
embedded in the text either diegetically, as background sound, or more
esoterically, as cryptic-epigraphic ciphers and repeated incantations: a
portal effect that gratifyingly echoes (in reverse) the way in which music
of the 1970s, especially postpunk, would direct listeners to fiction. 1980
is haunted in particular by Throbbing Gristle, especially the phrase that
they took from another killer, Charles Manson: ‘can the world be as sad
as it seems?’ In Peace’s hands, this question becomes an urgent
theological enquiry, the very relentlessness of the sadness and misery he
recounts calling forth an absent God, a God who is experienced as
absence, the great light eclipsed by the world’s unending tears. The
world, the sad, desolated world, is full of angels whose wings have either
been shorn off, reduced to stubble, or which have grown into gigantic,
dirty monstrosities...addict angels hooked on alcohol, casual but
incessant lusts, and the trash of the consumer society that is struggling to
be born out of the wreckage of the social democratic consensus...angels
whose ultimate response to the world is puking (everyone pukes in
Peace’s books), throwing up the whiskies and the undercooked crispy
pancakes, but never being able to purge any of it, never being able to
take flight.

The religious elements in the books become increasingly foregrounded
as the Quartet develops, until the deeply ambiguous, hallucinatory

ending of 1983 becomes a quasi-Gnostic treatise on evil and suffering.
The final section of the novel, ‘Total Eclipse Of The Heart’ (that
transfiguration of pop cultural reference into epigraph being one of
Peace’s signature techniques), explicitly posits the idea that, far from
undermining the existence of God, evil and suffering entail that God
must exist. Eclipse implies something that is eclipsed, a hidden source of
light that produces all this shadow. In the philosophy of religion, the
problem of evil maintains that suffering, particularly suffering visited
upon the innocent, means that the theistic God could not exist, since a
benevolent, omnipotent and omniscient being would not countenance
undeserved suffering. With his inventory of wretched child abuse cases,
Dostoyevsky’s Ivan Karamazov makes the most famous, and most
passionate, statement of this position. Yet if there is no God, the
suffering remains, only now there is no possibility of its expiation; if
there can be no justice to come, the universe is permanently blighted,
irrevocably scarred by atrocity, abuse and torture.

The Red Riding novels inspired Channel 4 into making the kind of
television dramas that some of us had long since ceased hoping could
ever be made in Britain again. The three films, broadcast in 2009, were
the most striking British dramas of the first decade of the 21st century,
towering above all the facile costume epics, routine police procedurals
and emotional pornography which clogged the schedules. Moreover, in
their use of setting and landscape, in the epiphanic power of their
images, the Red Riding films attained a visual poetry and an
expressionist naturalism that exceeded practically anything British
cinema has achieved in the past 30 years.

As Nick James observed in his preview of the Red Riding films for
Sight & Sound, nothing in the previous career of the Red Riding’s three
directors - Julian Jarrold for 1974, James Marsh for 1980, and Anand
Tucker for 1983 - gave any hints that they could produce work of this
quality. In many ways, it is as if the auteur of these films was Peace
himself, and the three directors succeed so consummately because they
allowed themselves to be channels of his infernal vision. It was
inevitable that some compression occurred in the transition from page to
screen; indeed, one whole novel from Peace’s Red Riding sequence -
1977 - was never filmed, but Tony Grisoni deserves immense credit for
the way that he weaved the three films into a symphonic coherence that

nevertheless refused easy closure and intelligibility.

Peace’s equivalent of Ellroy’s anti-hero Dudley Smith, the corrupt
detective who justifies his own running of drugs and vice operations as
‘containment’, is Maurice Jobson, the whey-faced policeman who
features in all three of the films. Where Smith (as masterfully played by
James Cromwell in the best Ellroy adaptation to date, LA Confidential
[1997]) is charming, charismatic and flamboyantly loquacious, Jobson
(as played by David Morrissey in the C4 adaptations) is taciturn,
abstracted, immobile, blank, in a semi-fugue state of disassociation from
the atrocities he participates in. Morrissey’s is one of many excellent
performances in the trilogy: all of them masterpieces of measure and
controlled power, proper television/ film acting, far from the braying
thespery that the British theatrical tradition often turns out. Rebecca
Hall is damaged and dangerous as Paula Garland, Maxine Peake, angular
yet vulnerable as Helen Marshall. Sean Harris manages to make Robert
Craven plausibly loathsome without tripping over into grand guignol
grotesquerie; while Paddy Considine brings a flinty resolution to the role
of Peter Hunter, one of the few lightbringers in the Red Riding’s North,
an inverted world in which evil enjoys carnivalesque licence and the
police and the powerful are free to ‘do what they want’.

The film adaptation of Peace’s extraordinary novel The Damned Utd
lived down to expectations to just about the same extent that the
Channel 4 films exceeded them. The team tasked with adapting the
novel looked unpromising. Before The Damned Utd, Director Tom Hooper
(drafted in after Stephen Frears left the project) had a background in
fairly unremarkable television (he would later go on to make The King’s
Speech), while the shtick of screenwriter Peter Morgan and lead actor
Michael Sheen - as established in The Queen and Frost/ Nixon - didn’t
have any obvious fit with Peace’s fractured and abrasive modernism. In
the end, Hooper and Morgan didn’t adapt Peace; they eliminated him.
Hooper’s film returns us to the found object-narrative - Brian Clough’s
bitter 44-day stint as manager of Leeds United in 1974 - that Peace used
as the raw material for his ‘fiction based on a fact’. What’s missing is
everything that Peace brought to the facts: the bite of a Real that will
always elude (bourgeois) realism; and the shaping power of a Gnostic
mythography, in which the most malign entity is the cursed land of
Yorkshire itself.

It can be tiresome to criticise a film adaptation simply for the ways it
differs from its source novel. In this case, however, a close comparison of
the two versions of The Damned Utd is instructive, for two reasons. First,
because, in erasing Peace’s signature, the film in effect competes with his
rendition of the Clough/ Leeds story; and second, because Peace’s pulp
modernism precisely offers British culture an escape from the kind of
good humoured, well balanced, middle of the road, middlebrow realism
that Hooper and Morgan trade in.

At the press screening, Morgan said that when he read The Damned
Utd, it brought a nostalgia rush ‘like eating Farley’s rusks’. Yet surely
even the most guileless of the readers of Peace’s novel could see that it
tastes not of the warm mush of baby food but of bile, scotch and
refluxed stomach acid. In Hooper and Morgan’s hands, Clough’s story is
reduced to all of the givens, all the off-the-shelf narrative and thematic
pegs: he was a ‘misunder-stood genius’, struggling against an
establishment represented by puffed-up provincial patriarchs like the
Derby County chairman, Sam Longson (well played by Jim Broadbent);
he was self-destructive, and he needed his partner Peter Taylor (Timothy
Spall) to curb his excesses; he was locked into an oedipal struggle with
the man he replaced at Leeds, Don Revie. Even this is told more than it
is shown, and throughout, the audience treated as if it is witless:
dialogue is too often used for clumsy plot exposition or to crudely
telegraph Themes. Not only do Hooper and Morgan fail to evoke Peace’s
existential terrain, his blighted vision of Yorkshire, they also convey
little of his intense sense of territoriality. In the novel, Leeds’s Elland
Road ground is the site of a struggle over space in which Clough is up
against both the spectre of Don Revie and the animal aggression of the
players he has left behind. (A striking image from the novel - of Clough
chopping up and burning Revie’s desk in an attempt to exorcise the
absent father’s ghost - inexplicably never made it to screen.) The film
also misses the purgatorial rhythm of sport which Peace caught so
acutely. As every sports fan - never mind about coach - knows, the
jouissance of sport is essentially masochistic. ‘The Damned Utd shows
what Clough’s tragedy was,’ Chris Petit put in his review of the novel,
‘deep down, he knew that winning was only loss deferred.’ The intense
fear that colours everything in Peace’s novel is dissolved in a tone that is
frequently jaunty.

Then there is Michael Sheen. The problem with Sheen’s now well
established approach to historical characters is that it deprives the film’s
world of any autonomous reality - everything is indexed to a reality
external to the film, judged only by how well it matches our already
existing image of the character, whether that be Clough, Kenneth
Williams, Blair or Frost. (And there are bizarre bleed-throughs between
the characters - at one point, it felt as if Sheen’s campy Clough had
morphed into Kenneth Williams.) Certainly, Peace has an advantage over
the film-makers here: written fiction can move beyond received
television images of figures from recent history far more quickly than
film can but an actor with more courage and presence than Sheen might
have reached beyond physical appearances to reach a truth of Clough
not accessible via the TV footage. Instead, Sheen offers his usual tracing
of mannerisms and verbal tics, competent enough as far as it goes, but
devoid of any of the tortured inner life that Peace gave to his Clough.
Even if the acting were uniformly superb, it would have needed far more
than Hooper provides in order to summon the dread and misery of
Peace’s world; but the indifferent photography and the often appalling
soundtrack make Hooper’s The Damned Utd feel more like a
dramatisation of actual events than a film of Peace’s novel.

Now Then, Now Then: Jimmy Savile and ‘the 70s

On Trial’

July 2013

The turn that events took had all the look of some kind of ritual
assassination. The killing not of a body - the body was already dead -
but of a name. It was as if some kind of deal had been struck - you’ll get
to live out your life with your reputation intact (or as intact as it could
be), but a year after your death, it will all be destroyed. Nothing,
absolutely nothing, will survive. Your headstone will be dismantled. The
penthouse in which you lived will be demolished. Your name will
become synonymous with evil.

September 2012, and it all starts to come up. Like a build-up of
effluent that could no longer be contained, first seeping, then surging
out. Jimmy Savile, the nation’s favourite grotesque, the former DJ and
children’s entertainer, is exposed as a serial sex abuser and paedophile.
You can’t say it comes as a surprise, and that’s one of the most unsettling
aspects of the whole affair. How out in the open it all was...We all read
the text purporting to be the transcript of an unbroadcast scene from the
BBC’s satirical programme, Have I Got News For You, in which Savile is
openly accused of being a child sex abuser, and took it at face value (it
seems now that the transcript was a fake, but it was an astonishingly
convincing simulation...The rhythm of the interaction between the
panellists...The way the verbal sparring escalates into aggression...The
name of the supposed victim, Sarah Cornley...it all had a ring of
authenticity - the signature of a Real, perhaps, that could not at then be
recognised except in fiction...)

Yes, in a certain way, it was all out in the open - we all knew, or felt
that we knew - but it mattered that the abuse was never acknowledged
in his lifetime. For while the story remained unofficial Savile would not
only go unpunished, he could continue to comport himself as a
celebrated entertainer, a knight of the realm, stalwart charity fundraiser.

No doubt Savile took a sociopathic delight in being able to get away
with it in plain sight. In his 1974 autobiography, As It Happens, Savile
had boasted about having sex with an underage runaway. The police
wouldn’t dare touch him, he taunted. Neither, it seemed, would the
media. Occasionally, a journalist would attempt to breach his defences.
Louis Theroux did his trademark gentle probing of Savile about the
paedophilia allegations in 2000 BBC documentary, but of course there
was no question of the old man cracking.

By the end of 2012, the 70s was returning, no longer as some
bittersweet nostalgia trip, but as a trauma. The phrase it’s like something
out of David Peace has become something of a commonplace in the past
few years. Strangely for fiction that is about the past, Peace’s work has
actually gained in prophetic power since its publication. Peace wasn’t
predicting the future - how could he be, when he was writing about the
70s and the 80s? - so much as he had fixated on those parts of the past
which were about to resurface. The Fritzl case had echoes of the
underground lair in which children are kept prisoner in the Red Riding
novels. And everything that came to light about conspiracies amongst
the English power elite - all the murk and tangle of Murdoch and
Hillsborough - seemed to throw us back into Peace’s labyrinths of
corruption and cover-up. Murdoch, Hillsborough, Savile...Pull on one
thread and it all started to connect, and, wherever you looked, there was
the same grim troika - police, politicians, media...Watching each other’s
backs (partly for fear that they will be stabbed in their own back)...
Having the goods on each other, the best kind of insurance policy, the
ruling class model of solidarity...

After his death, Savile increasingly started to look like something
Peace had dreamt up. We were drawn to a certain kind of fiction
because consensual reality, the commonsense world that we like to think
we live in, wasn’t adequate to a figure like Savile. At the same time, it
became clear that the elements in Peace’s writing that previously seemed
most melodramatically excessive were those which ended up rhyming
with the new revelations. It’s as if melodramatic excess is built into the
Real itself, and the sheer implausibility of corruption and abuse itself
forms a kind of cloak for the abuser: surely this can’t be happening?

Savile’s stomping ground was right in the heart of Peace’s territory...in
Leeds...where the entrepreneur-DJ started to build his empire, and

where, knowing that abuse is easier to get away with when it comes
disguised as care, he volunteered as a hospital porter... A spoonful of
sugar helps the medicine go down... Incredibly, Savile was for a time a
suspect in the Yorkshire Ripper investigation - members of the public
had named Savile, and the body of one of the Ripper’s victims, Irene
Richardson, had been found very near to his flat. Then there was the
infamous photograph of Savile, Peter Sutcliffe and Frank Bruno at
Broadmoor in 1991 - Savile, toting his signature cigar, brokering a
meeting between a serial killer and a troubled former celebrity boxer.
The grinning Sutcliffe looks like he’s wearing one of Savile’s shell-suits.
The insanity of a society and of an era - all their occult complicities
between celebrity, psychosis and criminality - is screamingly exposed
here. Ritual inversion: light (entertainment) transforming into the
darkest horror. By the end of 2012, Savile’s name was so irretrievably
sullied that his old friend Peter Sutcliffe felt the need to speak up for
him.

Savile was the kind of figure who came to dominate popular culture
without inspiring much affection. You couldn’t say he was ever loved.
Someone writing in to the London Review of Books dug up the BBC’s
audience research reports on Savile’s first appearances on Top of the
Pops. ‘10 December 1964. Jimmy Savile, who introduced the programme
on this occasion, was obviously disliked by a large number of the sample
audience. Many indicated their aversion to this artist by remarking that
anything they had to say about him would be “quite unprintable”, whilst
comment by those who freely expressed their feelings was liberally
larded with such terms as “this nutcase”; “this obnoxious ‘thing’”; and
“this revolting spectacle”.’ You don’t have to be loved, or even liked, to
be a popular figure. Savile didn’t even have the love-to-hate appeal of a
national pantomime villain such as Simon Cowell. His ticket to fame was
his grotesquerie itself (and this grotesquerie meant that one of the most
initially unnerving things about the revelations was being forced to think
of Savile as any kind of sexual being). As Andrew O’Hagan argued in his
piece on Savile for the London Review of Books, what mattered in the
new world of television light entertainment was not likeability, or talent,
but a certain larger-than-life aura - call it eccentricity, or call it
derangement - which Savile easily possessed as his birthright. Even
those who found Savile creepy could accept that he ‘belonged’ on

television. After all, where else could he possibly belong? The problem
was that, after the 60s, if you belonged on television, there was nowhere
that wasn’t open to you. We now know that Savile was given keys to the
Broadmoor hospital for the criminally insane, so that he could wander
around the institution - just one example of the freedoms that Savile’s
celebrity and power would acquire for him. We hear that Savile
molested paraplegic patients in their hospital beds, and I’m reminded of
Dennis Potter’s 1976 television play, Brimstone and Treacle, in which the
lead character, the unctuous Martin, rapes a severely brain-damaged
young woman while pretending to care for her. The BBC withdrew the
play just before it was due to be broadcast - presumably at around the
same time that Savile was appearing on Saturday night kids’ TV while
raping helpless patients in private.

As Savile’s reputation descended into the mire, it pulled others’ with
it. The police investigation prompted by the scandal, Operation Yewtree,
went after a whole slew of former household names with (surely) more
to come. Someone, I don’t remember who, says it’s like the 70s have gone
on trial. Yes, but it’s a very particular strand of the 70s that is under
investigation - not the officially debauched rock ‘n’ roll 70s, not
Zeppelin or Sabbath, but the family entertainment 70s.

As the stories mounted up, Savile came to seem more and more
unbelievable. Taken together, even facts that were already known about
Savile before his death came to look as if they couldn’t possibly be true.
Could it really be the case, for instance, that Savile had taken part in
negotiations between the Israeli and the Egyptian governments in the
70s? That he had mediated between Prince Charles and Princess Diana
as their marriage started to fail? (And how mad, how desperate, would
you have to be to take Jimmy Savile’s advice on your marriage?) That he
had spent Christmas after Christmas with Margaret Thatcher? (Thatcher
had tried four times to ennoble Savile, but was repeatedly rebuffed by
her advisers, and only succeeded in knighting him at the fag-end of her
period as Prime Minister.)

Murdoch and the Daily Mail wasted no time in pushing the idea that
the abuse was an institutional pathology - it was the BBC, and, more
broadly, the paternalistic media culture of the 60s and 70s, which had
incubated Savile’s corruption. The BBC, now in a permanent state of
confusion about its role in a neoliberal world, duly went into a neurotic,

narcissistic collapse. Its judgement was shot; it had failed to broadcast a
report about Savile’s abuse, and the crisis over Savile would push it into
moving too hastily when, a few months later, a Tory peer was wrongly
named in another abuse scandal. Murdoch and the Mail crowed on about
how the Savile revelations demonstrated the importance of press
freedom - but the question that they neatly evaded was, where were
their brave hacks? Why didn’t they expose Savile when it mattered, when
he was alive?

When the question started to be asked about how he’d got away with
it, we already knew the answer. He had connections at the very top. The
very top. And he took care to make friends with those in power and
authority at lower levels, too. Police officers regularly attended Savile’s
now notorious Friday Morning Club meetings at his home in Leeds.

Savile’s ascent to his unlikely position of power and influence required
immense amounts of hard work. One thing you could never accuse him
of was slacking. A forensically researched post on the Sump Plug blog
details how infernally busy Savile was in the early days of his career:

The Plaza [Ballroom in Manchester] was just one of many dance halls
and clubs that Savile oversaw, managed, diskjockeyed at, wielded
shadowy control over or had some kind of undeclared stake in, not
only in Manchester but also on the other side of the Pennines —in
Bradford, in Wakefield, in Halifax, over on the coast in Scarborough
and Whitby, and especially in Leeds. In his hometown the joints he
presided over included the Cat’s Whiskers and the Locarno Ballroom in
the County Arcade, known by locals simply as ‘the Mecca’ (later
rebranded as the Spinning Disc). That’s where, in 1958, his
predilection for underage girls first came to the attention of the police.
The matter was swiftly resolved by peeling a few hundred quid off the
big roll of twenties that he always carried, right up until he died.

Meanwhile, in Manchester on any given night in the late 50s and
early 60s, if you couldn’t find Savile at the Plaza at lunchtime, he’d
surely be at the Ritz later on. Or, if not, try the Three Coins in
Fountain Street. He didn’t even rest on Sundays; that was when he
span the platters for upwards of two thousand jivers and twisters at
his Top Ten Club at Belle Vue.

The man was everywhere —at practically every major dance hall
and nightclub in the North’s heaving conurbations, as much of a
fixture as the rotating mirror ball.

Savile’s empire quickly spread down south too, down to the Ilford Palais,
and to Decca Records, who would pay him to play their latest releases.
Up North, Savile’s rackets were protected by a gang of bodybuilders,
boxers, and wrestlers, including - improbably for those of us who came
to know him as the comically fat wrestler Big Daddy, cuddly mainstay of
Saturday afternoon television - Shirley Crabtree. The roots of 70s
television were here, in these ballrooms and dancehalls, their seediness
waiting to be transubstantiated into light entertainment.

But, a year after Savile’s death, the transubstantiation would go into
extreme reverse. Now then, now then - one of Savile’s catchphrases
started to assume an ominous significance. Only a few months
previously, the BBC had broadcast a number of programmes celebrating
his life and work. Now, condemnation is not enough: all traces of his
existence must be removed. Not only is the headstone taken away, but
we hear - can this possibly be true? It’s impossible to tell in the fevered
atmosphere - that the family of a child buried near to Savile had
requested that Savile’s remains be disinterred - as if he were some
medieval devil, a noxious cloud of malignancy that can corrupt even the
dead. More farcically, CBeebies, one of the BBC’s children’s channels,
was censured because it broadcasted a repeat of an episode of the
programme the Tweenies, in which one of the characters impersonated
Savile.

Now then, now then...

At the time when Savile was abusing, the victims were faced, not with
Jimmy Savile the monster, Jimmy Savile the prolific abuser of children, but
with Jimmy Savile OBE - Sir Jimmy Savile - Jimmy Savile, Knight
Commander of the Pontifical Equestrian Order of Saint Gregory the Great.
When we ask how Savile got away with it all, we must remember this.
Naturally, fear played a part in keeping Savile’s victims quiet. Who’s
going to believe your word against the word of a television entertainer,

someone who has raised millions for charity? But we also need to take
seriously the way that power can warp the experience of reality itself.
Abuse by the powerful induces a cognitive dissonance in the vulnerable
- this can’t possibly be happening. What has happened can be pieced
together only in retrospect. The powerful trade on the idea that abuse
and corruption used to happen, but not any more. Abuse and cover-up
can be admitted, but only on condition that they are confined to the
past. That was then, things are different now...

London After the Rave: Burial

k-punk post April 14, 2006

Burial is the kind of album I’ve dreamt of for years; literally. It is oneiric
dance music, a collection of the ‘dreamed songs’ Ian Penman imagined in
his epochal piece on Tricky’s Mcocinquaye. Maxinquaye would be a
reference point here, as would Pole - like both these artists, Burial
conjures audio-spectres out of crackle, foregrounding rather than
repressing sound’s accidental materialities. Tricky and Pole’s
‘cracklology’ was a further development of dub’s materialist sorcery in
which ‘the seam of its recording was turned inside out for us to hear and
exult in’ (Penman). But rather than the hydroponic heat of Tricky’s
Bristol or the dank caverns of Pole’s Berlin, Burial’s sound evokes what
the press release calls a ‘near future South London underwater. You can
never tell if the crackle is the burning static off pirate radio, or the
tropical downpour of the submerged city out of the window.’

Near future, maybe...But listening to Burial as I walk through damp
and drizzly South London streets in this abortive Spring, it strikes me
that the LP is very London Now - which is to say, it suggests a city
haunted not only by the past but by lost futures. It seems to have less to
do with a near future than with the tantalising ache of a future just out
of reach. Burial is haunted by what once was, what could have been, and
- most keeningly - what could still happen. The album is like the faded
ten year-old tag of a kid whose Rave dreams have been crushed by a
series of dead end jobs.

Burial is an elegy for the hardcore continuum, a Memories From the
Haunted Ballroom for the Rave generation. It is like walking into the
abandoned spaces once carnivalised by Raves and finding them returned
to depopulated dereliction. Muted air horns flare like the ghosts of Raves
past. Broken glass cracks underfoot. MDMA flashbacks bring London to
unlife in the way that hallucinogens brought demons crawling out of the
subways in Jacob’s Ladder’s New York. Audio hallucinations transform

the city’s rhythms into inorganic beings, more dejected than malign. You
see faces in the clouds and hear voices in the crackle. What you
momentarily thought was muffled bass turns out only to be the rumbling
of tube trains.

Burial’s mourning and melancholia sets it apart from dubstep’s
emotional autism and austerity. My problem with dubstep has been that
in constituting dub as a positive entity, with no relation to the Song or to
pop, it has too often missed the spectrality wrought by dub’s subtraction-
in-process. The emptying out has tended to produce not space but an
oppressive, claustrophobic flatness. If, by contrast, Burial’s schizophonic
hauntology has a 3D depth of field it is in part because of the way it
grants a privileged role to voices under erasure, returning to dub’s
phono-decentrism. Snatches of plaintive vocal skitter through the tracks
like fragments of abandoned love letters blowing through streets
blighted by an unnamed catastrophe. The effect is as heartbreakingly
poignant as the long tracking shot in Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979) that
lingers over sublime objects-become trash.

Burial’s London is a wounded city, populated by ecstasy casualties on
day release from psychiatric units, disappointed lovers on night buses,
parents who can’t quite bring themselves to sell their Rave 12 inches at a
carboot sale, all of them with haunted looks on their faces, but also
haunting their interpas-sively nihilist kids with the thought that things
weren’t always like this. The sadness in the Dem 2 meets Vini Reilly-era
Durutti Column ‘You Hurt Me’ and ‘Gutted’ is almost overwhelming.
‘Southern Comfort’ only deadens the pain. Ravers have become
deadbeats, and Burial’s beats are accordingly undead - like the tik-tok of
an off-kilter metronome in an abandoned Silent Hill school, the klak-klak
of graffiti-splashed ghost trains idling in sidings. 10 years ago, Kodwo
Eshun compared the ‘harsh, roaring noise’ of No U-Turn’s ‘hoover bass’
with ‘the sound of a thousand car alarms going off simultaneously’. The
subdued bass on Burial is the spectral echo of a roar, burned-out cars
remembering the noise they once made.

Burial reminds me, actually, of paintings by Nigel Cooke. The morose
figures Cooke graffitis onto his own paintings are perfect visual
analogues for Burial’s sound. A decade ago, jungle and hip hop invoked
devils, demons and angels. Burial’s sound, however, summons the ‘chain¬
smoking plants and sobbing vegetables’ that sigh longingly in Cooke’s

painting. Speaking at the Tate, Cooke observed that much of the
violence of graffiti comes from its velocity. There’s something of an
affinity between the way that Cooke re-creates graffiti in the ‘slow’
medium of oil paints and the way in which Burial submerges
(dubmerges?) Rave’s hyperkinesis in a stately melancholia. Burial’s
dilapidated Afro NoFuturism does for London in the 00s what Wu Tang
did for New York in the 90s. It delivers what Massive Attack promised
but never really achieved. It’s everything that Goldie’s Timeless ought to
have been. It’s the Dub City counterpart to Luomo’s Vocalcity. Burial is
one of the albums of the decade. Trust me.

Downcast Angel: Interview with Burial

The Wire 286, December 2007

With his self-titled debut LP last year, Burial established himself as an
extraordinary sonic mythographer, a sound poet capable of articulating
the existential malaise of an era and a place using only sampled voices,
broken breakbeats and musique concrete sound effects. Burial was a
vivid audio portrait of a wounded South London, a semi-abstract sound
painting of a city’s disappointment and anguish. Burial’s was a sound
saturated in dance music, but his unsequenced beats were too eccentric
to dance to. His sound was too out of step to fit into dubstep, the genre
his records were most likely to be filed under because they were released
on Kode9’s Hyperdub label. Burial’s sound might have fallen between
the cracks, but it wasn’t some eclectic melange of existing forms. What
was most impressive about it - and no doubt one of the reasons that it
was The Wire’s Record Of The Year for 2006 - was the consistency of its
sonic concept. There was an impersonal quality to Burial’s desolate
elegies, a quality reinforced by his doing only a few interviews and
refusing to allow a photograph of his face to be used in any promotion.
Swarming rumours filled the hype-vacuum. Many didn’t believe he
actually existed, attributing the record’s production to Basic Channel,
The Bug, Kode9 himself - a massive backhanded compliment to how
fully realised Burial’s (syn)aesthetic was. In fact, his sound has been
gestating slowly, semi-secretly, for at least half a decade. The tracks on
the first album had been selected from recordings Burial had made since
2001. His first appearance on vinyl was the track ‘Broken Home’ on
Wasteland’s Vulture Culture Mix 2 in 2004. And the 12’ EP South London
Boroughs, which trailed some of the most potent tracks from the first LP,
followed a year later.

Burial’s refusal to ‘be a face’, to constitute himself as a subject of the
media’s promotional machine, is in part a temperamental preference,
and in part a resistance to the conditions of ubiquitous visibility and

hyper-clarity imposed by digital culture - ‘It’s like a ouija board, it’s like
letting someone into your head, behind your eyes. It lets randoms in,’ he
says of the internet.

‘I’m just a well low key person,’ he admits. ‘I want to be unknown,
because I’d rather be around my mates and family, but there’s no need to
focus on it. Most of the tunes I like, I never knew what the people who
made them looked like, anyway. It draws you in. You could believe in it
more.’ Burial doesn’t DJ or play live, so photographs of him can’t even
be surreptitiously taken and circulated. ‘I just want to be in a symbol, a
tune, the name of a tune,’ he explains. ‘It’s not like it’s a new thing. It’s
one of the old underground ways and it’s easier.’ Burial is more sensitive
than most to the way in which people are shaped by impersonal forces.
‘When you are young you are pushed around by forces that are nothing
to do with you,’ he says. ‘You’re lost; most of the time you don’t
understand what’s going on with yourself, with anything.’ He knows that
his sound does not come from anything with a face.

Without being chauvinistic, Burial is fiercely loyal to the British
Hardcore continuum from which his sound has emerged. ‘If you’re well
into tunes, your life starts to weave around them,’ he says. ‘I’d rather
hear a tune about real life, about the UK, than some US hip-hop ‘I’m in
the club with your girl’-type thing. I love R&B tunes and vocals but I like
hearing things that are true to the UK, like drum ‘n’ bass and dubstep.
Once you’ve heard that underground music in your life, other stuff just
sounds like a fucking advert, imported.’ Indeed, one track on his new
album Untrue is called ‘UK’; another, one of the most sorrowful, is called
‘Raver’. Burial’s London seems to be a city populated by dejected Ravers,
returning to the sites of former revels and finding them derelict, forced
to contrast the quotidian compromises of their post-Rave life with the
collective ecstasy they once lived out. Burial’s is a re-dreaming of the
past, a condensation of relics of abandoned genres into an oneiric
montage. His sound is a work of mourning rather than of melancholia,
because he still longs for the lost object, still refuses to abandon the hope
that it will return. ‘A lot of those old tunes I put on at night and I hear
something in the tune that makes me feel sad,’ he says. ‘A few of my
favourite producers and DJs are dead now too - and I hear this hope in
all those old tracks, trying to unite the UK. But they couldn’t, because
the UK was changing in a different direction, away from us. Maybe the

feeling of the UK in clubs and stuff back then, it wasn’t as artificial, self-
aware or created by the Internet. It was more rumour, underground
folklore. Anyone could go into the night and they had to seek it out.
Because you could see it in people, you could see it in their eyes. Those
Ravers were at the edge at their lives, they weren’t running ahead or
falling behind, they were just right there and the tunes meant
everything. In the 90s you could feel that it had been taken away from
them. In club culture, it all became like superclubs, magazines, Trance,
commercialised. All these designer bars would be trying to be like clubs.
It all got just taken. So it just went militant, underground from that
point. That era is gone. Now there’s less danger, less sacrifice, less
journey to find something. You can’t hide, the media clocks everything.’
He checks his pessimism: ‘But [dubstep nights] DMZ and FWD have that
deep atmosphere and real feeling. The true underground is still strong, I
hear good new tunes all the time.’

After a statement as definitive as his first LP, it was difficult to
imagine where Burial would go next. But Untrue substantially modifies
the sound auditioned on Burial The most obvious difference from the
first record is the amount and type of vocal on the new LP. His mentor
Kode9 describes it as ‘weird soul’ and, if the reference points for the
debut were early to mid-90s Rave and Jungle, the touchstones on Untrue
are late 90s Garage and 2-step. The cut-up and pitchshifted voices -
looped fragments of longing - make Untrue even more addictive and
even more keeningly moving than Burial. Burial had in fact produced a
whole album’s worth of material in another style - ‘more technical, all
the tunes sounded like some kind of weapon that was being taken apart
and put back together again’ - but he scrapped it. ‘I was worrying,’ he
recalls, ‘I’d made all these dark tunes and I played them to my mum, and
she didn’t like them. I was going to give up, but she was sweet, telling
me, ‘Just do a tune, fuck everyone off, don’t worry about it.’ My dog
died and I was totally gutted about that. She was just like, ‘Make a tune,
cheer up, stay up late, make a cup of tea.’ And I rang her mobile 20
minutes later and I’d made that ‘Archangel’ tune [on Untrue], and I was
like, ‘I’ve made the tune, the tune you told me to make.”

Burial’s treatment of voice has always been crucial to his sound. Too
much dub-influenced music is content to simply erase the voice and turn
up the echo, but Burial instinctively knew that dubbing is about veiling

the song, about reducing it to a tantalising tissue of traces, a virtual
object all the more beguiling because of its partial desubstantialisation.
The drizzly crackle that has become one of his sonic signatures is part of
the veiling process. Self-deprecatingly, he claims that he initially used
the crackle to conceal ‘the fact that I wasn’t very good at making tunes’.
But he is not so much influenced by dub as by the ‘vocal science’
developed by Jungle, Garage and 2-step producers. When he and his
brothers would listen to darkside Jungle, Burial found himself
increasingly drawn to the vocal tracks. ‘I’d love these vocals that would
come in, not proper singing but cut-up and repeating, and executed
coldly. It was like a forbidden siren. I was into the cut-up singing as
much as the dark basslines. Something happens when I hear the subs,
the rolling drums and vocals together. So when I started doing tunes, I
didn’t have the kit and I didn’t understand how to do it properly, so I
couldn’t make the drums and bass sound massive, so as long as it had a
bit of singing in it, it forgave the rest of the tune. Then I couldn’t believe
that I’d done a tune that gave me that feeling that proper records used
to, and the vocal was the one thing that seemed to take the tune to that
place. My favourite tunes were underground and moody but with killer
vocals: ‘Let Go’ by Teebee, ‘Being With You Remix’ by Foul Play, Intense,
Alex Reece, Digital, Goldie, Dillinja, EL-B, D-Bridge, Steve Gurley. I miss
being on the bus to school listening to DJ Hype mixes.’

New Labour Britain is intoxicated by consensual sentimentality,
hooked on disposable simulated emotion. With the ubiquity of TV talent
shows, religiose emoting has become a fast track to media recognition,
secular UK’s equivalent of sanctification and salvation. In this process,
singing has become almost incidental - it’s lachrymose back stories that
the media really hungers for. Burial’s strategy with singing is exactly
contrary to this: he removes voices from biography and narrative,
transforming them into fluttering, flickering abstractions, angels
liberated from the heavy weight of personal history. ‘I was listening to
these Guy Called Gerald tunes,’ he says. ‘I wanted to do vocals but I can’t
get a proper singer like him. So I cut up a cappellas and made different
sentences, even if they didn’t make sense, but they summed up what I
was feeling.’ In the process of changing the pitch of the vocals, buried
signals come to light. ‘I heard this vocal and it doesn’t say it but it
sounds like ‘archangel’,’ says Burial. ‘I like pitching down female vocals

so they sound male, and pitching up male vocals so they sound like a girl
singing.’ This is apt, as angels are supposed to be without gender. ‘Well
that works nice with my tunes, kind of half boy half girl,’ he enthuses. ‘I
understand that moody thing, but some dance music is too male. Some
Jungle tunes had a balance, the glow, the moodiness that comes from
the presence of both girls and boys in the same tune. There’s tension
because it’s close, but sometimes perfect together. I look like her. I am
her.’

Kode9 describes the album as ‘downcast euphoria’, and that seems to
fit. ‘I wanted to make a half euphoric record,’ Burial agrees. ‘That was an
older thing that UK underground music used to have. Old Rave tunes
used to be the masters of that, for a reason, to do with the Rave, half
human endorphins and half something hypnotised by drugs. It was
stolen from us and it never really came back. Mates laugh at me because
I like whale songs. But I love them, I like vocals to be like that, like a
night cry, an angel animal.’

Angels, again. On Untrue, Burial’s Ravers appear as downcast angels,
beings of light exiled into the dull weight of the worldly. Untrue is like
German director Wim Wenders’s Wings Of Desire (1987) relocated to the
UK: an audio vision of London as a city of betrayed and mutilated
angels, their wings clipped. But angels also hover above the hopeless and
the abandoned here. ‘My new tunes are about that,’ Burial agrees,
‘wanting an angel to be watching over you, when there’s nowhere to go
and all you can do is sit in McDonalds late at night, not answering your
phone.’

As you might expect, Burial’s attunement to angels, demons and
ghosts goes back to childhood. ‘My dad when I was really little,’ he says,
‘sometimes he used to read me MR James stories. On the South Bank last
year, I bunked off from my day job and I found a book of MR James
ghost stories. The one that fucked me up when I was little was “Oh,
Whistle And I’ll Come To You, My Lad”. Something can betray how
sinister it is even at a distance. Something weird happens with MR
James, because even though it’s in writing, there’ll be a moment when
the person meets the ghost, where you can’t quite believe what you’ve
read. You go cold, just for those few lines when you glimpse the ghost
for a second, or he describes the ghost face. It’s like you’re not reading
any more. In that moment it burns a memory into you that isn’t yours.

He says something like, “There’s nothing worse for a human being than
to see a face where it doesn’t belong.” But if you’re little, and you’ve got
an imagination which is always messing you up and darking you out,
things like that are almost comforting to read.

‘Also,’ he continues, ‘there is nothing worse than not recognising
someone you know, someone close, family, seeing a look in them that
just isn’t them. I was once in a lock-in in a pub and the regulars there
and some mates started telling these fucked-up ghost stories from real
life, maybe that had happened to them, and I swear if you heard them...
One girl told me the scariest thing I ever heard. Some of these stories
would stop a few words earlier than seemed right. They don’t play out
like a film, they’re too simple, too everyday, slight. Those stories ring
true and I never forgot them. Sometimes maybe you see ghosts. On the
underground with an empty Costcutters plastic bag, nowhere to go, they
are smaller, about 70 per cent smaller than a normal person, smaller
than they were in life.’

Burial makes the most convincing case that our Zeitgeist is essentially
hauntological. The power of Derrida’s concept lay in its idea of being
haunted by events that had not actually happened, futures that failed to
materialise and remained spectral. Burial craves something he never
actually experienced firsthand. ‘I’ve never been to a festival, a Rave in a
field, a big warehouse, or an illegal party,’ he says, ‘just clubs and
playing tunes indoors or whatever. I heard about it, dreamed about it.
My brother might bring back these records that seemed really adult to
me and I couldn’t believe I had them. It was like when you first saw
Terminator or Alien when you’re only little. I’d get a rush from it, I was
hearing this other world, and my brother would drop by late and I’d fall
asleep listening to tunes he put on.’ It was his older brother who made
Rave a kind of ‘present absence’ in Burial’s life, a space to be filled with
yarns and yearnings. ‘He loved tunes, Rave tunes, Jungle,’ Burial tells
me. ‘He lived all that stuff, and he was gone, he was on the other side of
the night. We were brought up on stories about it: leaving the city in a
car and finding somewhere and hearing these tunes. He would sit us
down and play these old tunes, and later on he’d play us ‘Metropolis’,
Reinforced, Paradox, DJ Hype, Foul Play, DJ Crystl, Source Direct and
Techno tunes.’

The Rave relics feed a hunger for escape. ‘I respect working hard but I

dread a day job,’ asserts Burial. ‘Or a job interview. I’ve got a truant
heart, I just want to be gone. I’d be in the kitchens, the corridors at
work, and I’d be staring at the panels on the roof, clocking all the
maintenance doors, dreaming about getting into the airducts. A portal.
As a kid I used to dream about being put in the bins, escaping from
things, without my mum knowing she’d put me out in the bins. So I’m in
a black plastic bag outside a building and hearing the rain against it, but
feeling all right, and just wanting to sleep, and a truck would take me
away.’ A too quick psychoanalytic reading would hear this as a thinly
coded wish to return to the womb - and Burial’s warm bass certainly
feels enwombing - but that would be to ignore the desire to flee that is
also driving this fantasy. Burial wants out, but he cannot positively
characterise what lies beyond. ‘We all dream about it,’ he says. ‘I wish
something was there. But even if you fight to see it, you never see
anything. You don’t have a choice. You’d be on the way to a job, but
you’re longing to go down this other street, right there, and you walk
past it. No force on Earth could make you go down there, because you’ve
got to traipse to wherever. Even if you escape for a second, people are
on your case, you can’t go down old Thames side and throw your mobile
in.’

But there are always flickers and flashes of the other side. After¬
images. ‘I used to get taken away to the middle of nowhere, by the sea,’
concludes Burial. ‘I love it out there, because when it’s dark, it’s totally
dark, there’s none of this ambient light London thing. We used to have
to walk back and hold hands and use a lighter. See the light, see where
you were and then you’d walk on, and the image of where you’ve just
been would still be on your retina.

Sleevenotes for The Caretaker’s
Theoretically Pure Anterograde Amnesia

May 2006

Could it be said that we all now suffer from a form of theoretically pure
anterograde amnesia?

Oliver Sacks’ The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat and Christopher
Nolan’s Memento (2000) have made the features of the condition -
referred to, misleadingly, as short-term memory loss - well-known. In
fact, sufferers do produce new memories, but they are not retained.
There is no long-term encoding. This type of amnesia is anterograde
rather than retrograde because it does not affect any memories formed
before the onset of condition. Theoretically: in practice, it is likely that
even the old memories will undergo some degradation.

On Theoretically Pure Anterograde Amnesia the album, a tendency in the
Caretaker’s music has reached a kind of culmination. The theme was
once homesickness for the past. Now, it is the impossibility of the
present.

Selected Memories From The Haunted Ballroom was a kind of replicant
mnemonic implant, a false memory of the tearoom pop of the twenties
and thirties. For those of us haunted by the lambent ache of A1 Bowlly’s
croon in The Shining and Pennies From Heaven, that kind of Total Recall
trip was irresistible. The ghosts were so glamorous, their bob haircuts
and pearls glistening in the candlelight, their dance moves oh so elegant.

An occulted reference might have been The Invention of Morel (an
influence upon Last Year at Marienbad (1961) and therefore also upon
The Shining (1980)), Adolfo Bioy Casares’ science fictional lovesong to
Louise Brooks. Casares imagined a world we live in it where the spectres
of the beautiful and the damned are preserved forever, their little
gestures and banal conversations transformed, by repetition, into holy
artefacts. The simulation machine on Morel’s island is film, of course,
and who has not at some time wanted to do as Casares’ hero does and

pass beyond the screen, so as to finally be able to talk with the ghosts
you have for so long mooned over? It is the same temptation that Jack
yields to in The Shining when he enters into the consensual hallucination
of The Overlook. The Gold Room, in which the Scott Fitzgerald-era elite
forever cavort in a ceaseless whirl of wit, cocaine and wealth, is
perfectly heavenly. But you know what the price of the ticket to heaven
is, don’t you Jack?

Don’t you?

It is that grave-damp, mildewed odour which the perfume and the
preservative never quite covered up which has always made The
Caretaker’s music uneasy, rather than easy, listening. Queasy listening,
actually. It has never been possible to ignore the shadows lurking at the
periphery of our audio-vision; the trip down memory lane was
deliciously intoxicating but there was a bitter undertaste. A faint horror,
something like the dim but insistent awareness of plague and mortality
that must have nagged at the entranced-dancers in Poe’s ‘The Masque of
the Red Death’.

That’s not all.

Something else was wrong.

The sepia and the soft focus were photoshopped in, we knew that. These
thick carpets and china tea-sets weren’t really there. And they never
were, not for us. We were in a simulation of another’s mind’s eye. The
mottled, honeyed, slurred and reverbed quality of the sound alerted us
to the fact that this was not the object itself but the object as it is for
someone else’s memory.

On Theoretically Pure Anterograde Amnesia, things have worsened
immeasurably. It is as if the Overlook simulation has run out of steam.
The lights have gone out. The hotel is rotten, a burned out wreck long
since gutted, the band is pale and very nearly translucent.

The threat is no longer the deadly sweet seduction of nostalgia. The
problem is not, any more, the longing to get to the past, but the inability
to get out of it. You find yourself in a grey black drizzle of static, a haze
of crackle. Why is it always raining here? Or is that just the sound of the

television, tuned to a dead channel?

Where were we?

You suppose that you could be in familiar territory. It’s difficult to
know if you’ve heard this before or not. There’s not much to go on. Few
landmarks. The tracks have numbers, not names. You can listen to them
in any order. The point is to get lost. That’s easy in this ill-seen, late
Beckett landscape. You extemporise stories they call it confabulation - to
make sense of the abstract shapes looming in the smoke and fog.

Who is editing the film, and why all the jump-cuts?

By now, very little a few haunting refrains lingering at the back of
your mind separates you from the desert of the real.

Let’s not imagine that this condition afflicts only a few unfortunates.
Isn’t, in fact, theoretically pure anterograde amnesia the postmodern
condition par excellence? The present - broken, desolated is constantly
erasing itself, leaving few traces. Things catch your attention for a while
but you do not remember them for very long. But the old memories
persist, intact...Constantly commemorated ... I love 1923...

Do we really have more substance than the ghosts we endlessly applaud?

The past cannot be forgotten, the present cannot be remembered.

Take care. It’s a desert out there...

Memory Disorder: Interview with
The Caretaker

The Wire 304, June 2009

‘I have always been fascinated by memory and its recall especially where
sound is concerned,’ writes James Kirby via email. ‘Some things we
remember easily and others we never seem to grasp. That idea was
developed more on the boxset I did [2006’s Theoretically Pure
Anterograde Amnesia] which was based around a specific form of amnesia
where sufferers can remember things from the past but are unable to
remember new things. To recreate that in sound was a challenge that I
relished really. I realised the only way was to make a disorientating set
with very few reference points. Fragments of melody breaking out of this
monotonous tone and audio quagmire. Even if you listen over and over
to all the songs you still can’t remember when these melodies will come
in. You have no favourite tracks, it’s like a dream you are trying to
remember. Certain things are clear but the details are still buried and
distant.’

Kirby’s description perfectly captures the unsettling experience of
listening to Theoretically Pure Anterograde Amnesia. With the release of
the six CD boxset, his project The Caretaker crossed over from being an
exercise in atmospheric nostalgia to being a harrowing investigation of
memory disorder. The box set is more like a sonic installation than a
record, a work whose conceptual and textural richness puts much sound
art to shame. The first three Caretaker records - Selected Memories From
The Haunted Ballroom (1999), A Stairway To The Stars (2001) and We’ll
All Go Riding On A Rainbow (2003) - swathed sampled British tearoom
pop in a gaslit halo of reverb and crackle. On Theoretically Pure
Anterograde Amnesia the effects and the surface noise take over, so that
instead of a gently dub-dilapidated pop, there is an unnavigable murk,
as abstract and minimal as a Beckett landscape. Echoes and
reverberations float free of any originating sound source in a sea of hiss

and static. If the earlier records suggested spaces that were mildewed but
still magnificent - grand hotels gone to seed, long abandoned ballrooms
- Theoretically Pure Anterograde Amnesia invokes sites that have
deteriorated into total dereliction, where every unidentified noise is
pregnant with menace. The 72 tracks - all of them numbered rather than
named - simulate the amnesiac condition, and the few fragments of well
known tunes that occasionally flare in the gloom are intermittent islands
of familiarity in a world that has become hostile and unrecognisable.

‘Maybe it’s a dark humour, a kind of an audio black comedy,’ Kirby
says of The Caretaker, but the solemnity of the project belies Kirby’s
reputation as a prankster. His label V/Vm notoriously released a version
of Lieutenant Pigeon’s ‘Mouldy Old Dough’ just after appearing on the
cover of The Wire 176 under the headline ‘Harder! Faster! Louder!’, one
of a series of manglings of mainstream music - tracks by Chris de Burgh,
John Lennon and Elton John were also butchered and reassembled - that
V/Vm issued.

It is the focus on cultural memory that holds together all of Kirby’s
work, including the V/Vm mash-ups. If the V/Vm (sub)versions of pop
come from the brash side of postmodern pastiche, then The Caretaker is
about the dark side of cultural retrospection. Theoretically Pure
Anterograde Amnesia was in many ways an act of diagnosis of a cultural
pathology. It might seem strange to describe a culture that is so
dominated by past forms as being amnesiac, but the kind of nostalgia
that is now so pervasive may best be characterised not as a longing for
the past so much as an inability to make new memories. Fredric Jameson
described one of the impasses of postmodern culture as the inability ‘to
focus our own present, as though we have become incapable of
achieving aesthetic representations of our own current experience.’ The
past keeps coming back because the present cannot be remembered.
Memory disorders have recurred as themes in the popular cinema in the
past decade or so: it is theoretically pure anterograde amnesia that
afflicts Leonard, the lead character in Memento, while the massively
successful Bourne films were preoccupied with memory loss. It is not
surprising that anxieties about memory should continually surface in late
capitalism, where, as Jameson and others have argued, perpetual
economic instability and the rapid turnover of ephemeral images leads
to a breakdown in any coherent sense of temporality.

Kirby has approached the failure of the future from a different angle
on another of his projects, 2006’s The Death Of Rave. Here, Rave is
desubstantialised, stripped of all bass weight and drum propulsion,
reduced to shimmer and haze. The tracks sound like they are being
heard from outside a club: a horribly accurate sonic metaphor, perhaps,
of our current state of exile from the future-shocking rate of innovation
that dance music achieved in the 80s and 90s. ‘Yeah, that project really
is in its infancy,’ Kirby says. ‘It came about as part of the V/Vm 365
project where the aim was to make one audio track a day. I used to go
Raves when I was younger, went through that whole explosion in
electronic music from 1987 to around 1992-93 when it seemed like there
was a new genre every single week. It was an amazing time in music to
hear so many things happening and so many new possibilities opening
up and to see and feel the energy of new music exploding on dancefloors
and in clubs. I think The Death Of Rave is about the loss in that spirit and
a total loss of energy in most electronic musics across the board. I feel
sorry these days for people when I go to clubs as that energy isn’t there
any more. I mean we have some so called very cool clubs in Berlin such
as Watergate and Berghain, but you compare them to those back in the
late 80s and early 90s in Manchester and it really is no comparison. Of
course new things pop up but the difference now really is that if
something explodes then before it can grow naturally people have
strangled it to death with parodies online and often a scene or new style
is dead before it even surfaces. House and Techno for instance took a
long time to mature in Chicago and Detroit, now there is no time, once
an idea is out of the rabbit’s hat it’s copied ad infinitum until the energy
is gone. That is the key word - ‘energy’, it’s the one thing I have always
been inspired by. For me those Death Of Rave tracks are about stripping
Rave music from all its energy and spirit of fun - taking the audio from
the Rave to the grave, if you like.’ The tracks are like energy flashbacks,
frail figments of Rave reconstructed in a serotonin-depleted brain.

Kirby’s other project The Stranger is organised around space rather
than time. ‘The Stranger really is a darker version of The Caretaker,’
Kirby says, ‘and is its closest relative. The Stranger is about creating a
physical location in sound. The last album for example [2008’s Bleaklow]
was about the site of Bleaklow which is in the Peak District, it can be a
grim place on the dark grey days but also beautiful on sunny days.

Weirdly I had a few people get in touch with me who walk up there and
they told me I captured the atmosphere perfectly and they used it as
they were walking up there. I guess the odd glint of sunshine coming
through that slate northern grey sky could be heard aurally.’

Kirby himself now lives in Berlin. ‘I moved to Berlin as it has the
atmosphere and opportunities of the big city but also there’s a lot of
space here to think more and also it’s easy to hide away on the dark
streets here. Also it’s not as brutal as Manchester here, there is more of
an openess as people don’t follow the media and news so much.’ Like
The Stranger, though, The Caretaker remains a project rooted in
Britishness - ‘it’s often only British music which has been used as source
material.’ A parallel for The Caretaker’s excavation of pre-rock British
pop is Dennis Potter’s musical drama for television, Pennies From Heaven.
‘The use of audio in Pennies From Heaven is amazing along with its
vibrancy and colour and of course the way Dennis Potter uses the
sadness in the lyrics to keep telling the story is also special as these
songs really are stories in themselves. John Clifford and Herk Harvey’s
film Carnival of Souls (1962) was also a point of reference, the closing
scenes in that film could even be audio from A Stairway To The Stars. I
only saw that film after people had mentioned it to me. It works a lot
that way, people will draw a line to something and I will then
investigate that too.’

But of course the main initial impetus for The Caretaker was Kubrick’s
The Shining. The name ‘the caretaker’ was taken from the role that Jack
Torrance is condemned to forever play in the haunted Overlook hotel
(‘you’ve always been the caretaker’, Torrance is told in one of the film’s
most chilling moments). The conceit was simple: inspired by ‘the
haunting sequences which feature the ballroom music which is playing
only in Jack’s mind’, Kirby thought, why not make a whole album of
material that might also have played in the Overlook? The Shining
soundtrack includes two tracks by A1 Bowlly, the between-the-wars
crooner whose songs features in many of Potter’s dramas, and Kirby
sought out music in a similar vein. ‘I spent a lot of time searching out
music from that era over a two or three year period and constantly
started to play around with this source material. The interesting thing
for me is the fact that most of that music is about ghosts and loss as it
was recorded between both the world wars. It’s of a totally different era

and had more or less been forgotten. Titles inspired new ideas as did the
audio itself. I was fortunate as there was a great record shop near where
I was in Stockport which was ran by two old guys and it specialised in
78s. I would take in audio and ask then what was similar and they
would scuttle off into the back of the shop and dig out some old
catalogue from the 1930s and then pull out vinyls for me. It was an
amazing resource sadly which is no longer there as one of the guys
passed away and the other decided to close the shop. It was like a
timewarp in there, like going back 30 or 40 years. They would hand
write receipts and half of their stock was in this backroom you were
denied access too. They had no idea what I was doing in there buying
these records, though one of them told me one time ‘You were born in
the wrong era as nobody is interested in this music who is your age.”

Kirby has tuned to more recent history for an upcoming project. ‘It has
been in my mind for a while to work on a Scragill/Thatcher project and
this is the perfect time for this now as we approach the 25th anniversary
of the Miners Strike. A lot has been written elsewhere about this conflict
and its outcome and legacy, I have been scouring online and also have
picked up some amazing footage to reprocess. It will link closely to The
Caretaker in terms of its style as it will be like watching a half
remembered version due to the processing. Some of the footage is totally
ghostlike as it was recorded on VHS tapes from Miners back in 1984, so
there is a real loss in quality and the sound fails to match the visuals. It’s
looking like a dream version maybe. This will be mainly video work
with also an incredibly limited vinyl release featuring audio from these
videos and some exclusive audio work.’ This will fit into a series of re¬
stagings of the Miners Strike this decade, including Jeremy Deller and
Artangel’s The Battle Of Orgreave and David Peace’s GB84.

Kirby decided to close V/Vm down last year. ‘V/Vm was a vehicle for
a lot of the work I have done but I think now as music consumers we
have reached a point where labels are not so important, what is more
important is delivery and availability of work.’ It is partly the
possibilities for the online distribution of music, which Kirby has always
been enthusiastic about, that led him to end V/Vm, but he ‘also found I
was using the name V/Vm less and less when it comes to new works. I’ve
been working on a very personal album in terms of moods I want to
convey and I guess I may use my own name for that.’ In fact, the album,

entitled History Always Favours The Winners, will come out under the
name Leyland Kirby (‘Leyland is my grandather’s and my middle name.
There are already too many James Kirby’s making music out there, if I
believe Google. Now I’m only competing with a glamour model from
Sheffield in the Google search.’) The Leyland Kirby music was made
without the use of samples, but it has clearly been informed by Kirby’s
time in the vaults. The tracks have an eerily untimely quality, a stately
grace, a filmic scope. On ‘When Did Our Dreams And Futures Drift So
Far Apart’, a doleful, echo-refracted piano desolately tracks through
subdued electronic textures. ‘The Sound Of Our Music Vanishing’ is a
more violent exercise in thwarted recall - here it as if the memories are
rushing in and being obliterated at the same time, like Basinski if the
tapes were being violently shredded instead of gently disintegrating. The
epic ‘When We Parted My Heart Wanted To Die’, meanwhile, has a
swelling, magisterial melancholy that recalls Angelo Badalamenti.

The Caretaker project continues, however. ‘I have started to play
shows finally as The Caretaker, usually I just like to let the music just
creep out of the speakers as if it’s actually the venue playing the audio or
that the sounds are in your own mind. I played in Athens last week in a
pitch black room which worked well, maybe I can work some visuals
into the live process but they would have to add to the audio and not
distract the listening process. I am always of course interested in playing
more relevant locations, so for instance Blackpool Tower would be
amazing as the ballroom there is a great Victorian example and perfect
for this particular audio recall.’

‘More than anything it’s all about research and mood when making
the albums,’ Kirby replies when I ask him how he makes The Caretaker
records. ‘Knowing the source material, maybe hearing a lyrical phrase
which opens up an idea in my mind or indeed just reading something,
such as with the Anterograde boxset which sparked off another idea and
offered a different tangent and possibility. Without going into the
specifics, things are reworked totally in a digital realm until the right
mood surfaces. It’s very important too that I am in the right mood
mentally to make that music which I think comes across certainly in the
later albums, as opposed maybe to the first album. I am getting better at
realising the days when I get the best results now when working on a
specific project. It’s strange really because there is a full range of

emotions in the music when I listen back, from loss to happiness,
dislocation, regret, longing. Maybe it’s the source music itself which
inspires this, but there are still for me a lot of personal moments in
amongst those albums. Maybe even some of my own memories are
intertwined in there.’

The word ‘research’ keeps coming up in Kirby’s discussion of The
Caretaker project. ‘I have been doing a lot of online research in the last
couple of years and also have been watching a lot of documentaries
about people who suffer from brain disorders and memory problems.
The last release [2008’s Persistent Repetition of Phrases] was based around
a lot of conditions where the sufferer just repeats themselves, so the
audio featured a lot of loops and microloops, it was a lot warmer and
more gentle than the boxset release. Not all memories are necessarily
bad or disturbing memories.’ On Persistent Repetition of Phrases, one of
The Wire’s top ten records of last year, there was accordingly a return of
the some of the prettiness that was absent from Theoretically Pure
Anterograde Amnesia, but there was also an icy lucidity, an exquisite
poise, about the record. It felt like a distillation and a consolidation. ‘The
challenge now is to move the sound somewhere else brainwise and
memory wise, that will take time to find the new direction. More
research will have to be done before I find the best pathway for future
exploration. I would also love to use this music on film as it would be
perfect for this, so maybe a door will open somewhere.’

Home is Where The Haunt is:
The Shining's Hauntology

k-punk post, January 23, 2006

1. The sound of hauntology

Conjecture: hauntology has an intrinsically sonic dimension.

The pun - hauntology, ontology - works in spoken French, after all. In
terms of sound, hauntology is a question of hearing what is not here, the
recorded voice, the voice no longer the guarantor of presence (Ian P:
‘Where does the Singer’s voice GO, when it is erased from the dub
track?’) Not phonocentrism but phonography, sound coming to occupy
the dis-place of writing.

Nothing here but us recordings...

2. Ghosts of the Real

Derrida’s neologism uncovers the space between Being and Nothingness.

The Shining - in both book and film versions, and here I suggest a side¬
stepping of the wearisome struggle between King fans and Kubrickians
and propose treating the novel and the film as a labyrinth-rhizome, a set
of interlocking correspondences and differences, a row of doors - is
about what lurks, unquiet, in that space. Insofar as they continue to
frighten us once we’ve left the cinema, the ghosts that dwell here are not
supernatural. As with Vertigo (1958), in The Shining it is only when the
possibility of supernatural spooks has been laid to rest that we can
confront the Real ghosts...or the ghosts of the Real.

3. The haunted ballroom

Mark Sinker: ‘ALL [Kubrick’s] films are fantastically ‘listenable’ (if you
use this in sorta the same sense you use watchable)’

Where does

The conceit of The Caretaker’s Memories from the Haunted Ballroom has
the simplicity of genius: a whole album’s worth of songs that you might
have heard playing in the Gold Room in The Shining’s Overlook Hotel.
Memories from the Haunted Ballroom is a series of soft-focus delirial-
oneiric versions of 20s and 30s tearoom pop tunes, the original numbers
drenched in so much reverb that they have dissolved into a suggestive
audio-fog, the songs all the more evocative now that they have been
reduced to hints of themselves. Thus A1 Bowlly’s ‘It’s All Forgotten Now’,
for instance, one of the tracks actually used by Kubrick on The Shining
soundtrack, is slurred down, faded in and out, as if it is being heard in
the ethereal wireless of the dreaming mind or played on the winding-
down gramophone of memory. As Ian Penman wrote of dub: ‘It makes of
the Voice not a self-possession but a dispossession - a ‘re’ possession by
the studio, detoured through the hidden circuits of the recording
console.’

the singer’s voice
GO?

4. In the Gold Room

Jameson: ‘it is by the twenties that the hero is haunted and possessed...’

Kubrick’s editing of the film does not allow any of the polyvalencies of
that phrase, ‘It’s All Forgotten Now’, to go un(re)marked. The
uncanniness of the song, today and 25 years ago when the film was
released, arises from the (false but unavoidable) impression that it is
commenting on itself and its period, as if were an example of the way in
which that era of beautiful and damned decadence and Gatsby glamour
were painfully, delightfully aware of its own butterfly’s wing
evanescence and fragility. Simultaneously, the song’s place in the film -
it plays in the background as a bewildered Jack speaks to Grady in the
bathroom about the fact that Grady has killed himself after brutally
murdering his children - indicates that what is forgotten may also be
preserved: through the mechanism of repression.

I don’t have any recollection of that at all.

Why does this Gold Room Pop, all those moonlight serenades and
summer romances, have such power? The Caretaker’s spectralised
versions of those lost tunes only intensifies something that Kubrick, like
Dennis Potter, had identified in the pop of the 20s and 30s. I’ve tried to
write before about the peculiar aching quality of these songs that are
melancholy even at their most ostensibly joyful, forever condemned to
stand in for states that they can evoke but never instantiate.

For Fredric Jameson, the Gold Room revels bespeak a nostalgia for
‘the last moment in which a genuine American leisure class led an
aggressive and ostentatious public existence, in which an American
ruling class projected a class-conscious and unapologetic image of itself
and enjoyed its privileges without guilt, openly and armed with its
emblems of top-hat and champagne glass, on the social stage in full view
of the other classes’. But the significance of this genteel, conspicuous
hedonism must be construed psychoanalytically as well as merely
historically. The ‘past’ here is not an actual historical period so much as
a fantasmatic past, a Time that can only ever be retrospectively -
retrospectrally - posited. The ‘haunted ballroom’ functions in Jack’s
libidinal echonomy (to borrow a neologism from Irigaray) as the place of
belonging in which, impossibly, the demands of both the paternal and
the maternal superegos can be met, the honeyed, dreamy utopia where
doing his duty would be equivalent to enjoying himself...Thus, after his
conversations with bartender Lloyd and waiter Grady (Jack’s frustrations
finding a blandly indulgent blank mirror sounding board in the former
and a patrician, patriarchal voice in the latter), Jack comes to believe
that he would be failing in his duty as a man and a father if he didn’t
succumb to his desire to kill his wife and child.

White man’s burden, Lloyd...white man’s burden...

If the Gold Room seems to be a male space (it’s no accident that the
conversation with Grady takes place in the men’s room), the place in
which Jack - via male intermediaries, intercessors working on behalf of
the hotel management, the house, the house that pays for his drinks -
faces up to his ‘man’s burdens’, it is also the space in which he can
succumb to the injunction of the maternal super-ego: ‘Enjoy’.

Michel Ciment: ‘When Jack arrives at the Overlook, he describes this
sensation of familiarity, of well-being (‘It’s very homey’), he would Tike

to stay here forever’, he confesses even to having ‘never been this happy,
or comfortable anywhere’, refers to a sense of deja vu and has the feeling
that he has ‘been here before’. ‘When someone dreams of a locality or a
landscape,’ according to Freud, ‘and while dreaming thinks “I know this,
I’ve been here before”, one is authorised to interpret that place as
substituting for the genital organs and the maternal body.’

5. Patriarchy/hauntology

Isn’t Freud's thesis - first advanced in Totem and Taboo and then
repeated, with a difference, in Moses and Monotheism, simply this:
patriarchy is a hauntology? The father - whether the obscene Alpha Ape
Pere-Jouissance of Totem and Taboo or the severe, forbidding patriarch
of Moses and Monotheism - is inherently spectral. In both cases, the
Father is murdered by his resentful children who want to re-take Eden
and access total enjoyment. Their father’s blood on their hands, the
children discover, too late, that total enjoyment is not possible. Now
stricken by guilt, they find that the dead Father survives - in the
mortification of their own flesh, and in the introjected voice which
demands its deadening.

6. A History of Violence

Ciment: ‘The camera itself - with its forward, lateral and reverse
tracking shots... folio wing a rigorously geometric circuit - adds further to
the sense of implacable logic and an almost mathematical progression.’

Even before he enters the Overlook, Jack is fleeing his ghosts. And the
horror, the absolute horror, is that he - haunter and the hunted - flees to
the place where they are waiting. Such is The Shining’s pitiless fatality
(and the novel is if anything even more brutal in its diagramming of the
network of cause-and-effect, the awful Necessity, the ‘generalized
determinism’, of Jack’s plight than the film).

Jack has a history of violence. In both novel and film of The Shining,
the Torrance family is haunted by the prospect that Jack will hurt
Danny...again. Jack has already snapped, drunkenly attacked Danny. An

aberration, a miscalculation, ‘a momentary loss of muscular
coordination. A few extra foot-pounds of energy per second, per second’:
so Jack tries to convince Wendy, and Wendy tries to convince herself.
The novel tells us more. How has it come to this, that a proud man, an
educated man, like Jack, is reduced to sitting there, false, greasy grin
plastered all over his face, sucking up everything that a smarmy
corporate non-entity like Stuart Ulman serves up? Why, because he has
been sacked from his teaching job for attacking a pupil, of course. That
is why Jack will accept, and be glad of, Ulman’s menial job in Overlook.

The history of violence goes back even further. One of the things
missing from the film but dealt with at some length in the novel is the
account of Jack’s relationship with his father. It’s another version of
patriarchy’s occult history, now not so secret: abuse begetting abuse.
Jack is to Danny as Jack’s father was to him. And Danny will be to his
child...?

The violence has been passed on, like a virus. It’s there inside Jack,
like a photograph waiting to develop, a recording ready to be played.

Refrain, refrain...

7. Home is where the haunt is

The word ‘haunt’ and all the derivations thereof may be one of the
closest English word to the German ‘unheimlich’, whose polysemic
connotations and etymological echoes Freud so assiduously, and so
famously, unravelled in his essay on ‘The Uncanny’. Just as ‘German
usage allows the familiar (das Heimliche, the ‘homely’) to switch to its
opposite, the uncanny (das Unheimliche, the ‘unhomely’)’ (Freud), so
‘haunt’ signifies both the dwelling-place, the domestic scene and that
which invades or disturbs it. The OED lists one of the earliest meanings
of the word ‘haunt’ as ‘to provide with a home, house.’

Fittingly, then, the best interpretations of The Shining position it
between melodrama and horror, much as Cronenberg’s History of
Violence (2005) is positioned between melodrama and the action film. In
both cases, the worst Things, the real Horror, is already Inside.... (and
what could be worse than that?)

You would never hurt Mommie or me, would ya?

8. The house always wins

What horrors does the big, looming house present? For the women of
Horrodrama, it has threatened non-Being, either because the woman will
be unable to differentiate herself from the domestic space or because -
as in Rebecca (itself an echo of Jane Eyre) - she will be unable to take
the place of a spectral-predecessor. Either way, she has no access to the
proper name. Jack’s curse, on the other hand, is that he is nothing but
the carrier of the patronym, and everything he does always will have
been the case.

I’m sorry to differ with you, sir. But you are the caretaker. You’ve always
been the caretaker. I should know, sir. I’ve always been here.

9. I’m right behind you Danny

Metz: ‘When Jack chases Danny into the maze with ax in hand and
states, ‘I'm right behind you Danny’, he is predicting Danny's future as
well as trying to scare the boy.’

Predicting Danny's future Jack might be, but that is why he could
equally well say ‘I’m just ahead of you Danny...’ Danny may physically
have escaped Jack, but psychically...? The Shining leaves us with the
awful suspicion that Danny may become (his) Daddy, that the damage
has already been done (had already been done even before he was born),
that the photograph has been taken, the recording made; all that is left is
the moment of development, of playing back.

Unmask!

(And how does Danny escape from Jack? By walking backwards in his
father’s footsteps).

10. The No Time of trauma

Jack: Mr. Grady. You were the caretaker here. I recognise ya. I saw your
picture in the newspapers. You, uh, chopped your wife and daughters up

into little bits. And then you blew your brains out.

Grady: That’s strange, sir. I don’t have any recollection of that at all.

What is the time when Jack meets Grady?

It seems that the murder - and suicide - has already happened, Grady
tells Jack that he had to correct his daughters. Yet - not surprisingly -
Grady has no memory - Bowlly’s ‘It’s All Forgotten Now’ wafting in the
background - of any such events.

‘I don’t have any recollection of that at all.’

(And you think, well, it’s not the sort of thing that you’d forget, killing
yourself and your children, is it? But of course, it’s not the sort of thing
that you could possibly remember. It is an exemplary case of that which
must be repressed, the traumatic Real.)

Jack: Mr. Grady. You were the caretaker here.

Grady: I’m sorry to differ with you, sir. But you are the caretaker.
You’ve always been the caretaker. I should know, sir. I’ve always been
here.

11. Overlooked

Overlook:

To look over or at from a higher place.
To fail to notice or consider; miss.

Hauntological Blues: Little Axe

k-punk post, October 3, 2006

Since we’re talking about hauntology, we ought to have mentioned
Beloved by now: not only Morrison’s novel, but also Demme’s astonishing
film. It’s telling that Demme is celebrated for his silly grand guignol, The
Silence of the Lambs, while Beloved is forgotten, repressed, screened out.
Hopkins’ pantomime ham turn as Lecter surely spooks no-one, whereas
Thandie Newton’s automaton-stiff, innocent-malevolent performance as
Beloved is almost unberable: grotesque, disturbing, moving in equal
measure.

Like The Shining - a film that was also widely dismissed for nigh on a
decade - Beloved (1998) reminds us that America, with its anxious
hankerings after an ‘innocence’ it can never give up on, is haunted by
haunting itself. If there are ghosts, then what was supposed to be a New
Beginning, a clean break, turns out to be a repetition, the same old story.
The ghosts were meant to have been left in the Old World...but here
they are...

Whereas The Shining digs beneath the hauntological structure of the
American family and finds an Indian Burial Ground, Beloved pitches us
right into the atrocious heart of America’s other genocide: slavery and its
aftermath. No doubt the film’s commercial failure was in part due to the
fact that the wounds are too raw, the ghosts too Real. When you leave
the cinema, there is no escape from these spectres, these apparitions of a
Real which will not go away but which cannot be faced. Some viewers
complain that Beloved should have been reclassifed as Horror...well, so
should American history...

Beloved comes to mind often as I listen to Stone Cold Ohio, the
outstanding new LP by Little Axe. Little Axe have been releasing records
for over a decade now, but, in the 90s, my nervous system amped up by
jungle’s crazed accelerations, I wasn’t ready to be seduced by their
lugubrious dub blues. In 2006, however, the haunted bayous of Stone

Cold Ohio take their place alongside Burial’s phantom-stalked South
London and Ghost Box’s abandoned television channels in hauntological
Now. Since I received Stone Cold Ohio last week, I’ve listened to little
else; and when I wasn’t immersed in Stone Cold Ohio I was re-visiting the
other four Little Axe LPs. The combination of skin-tingling voices (some
original, some sampled) with dub space and drift is deeply addictive.
Little Axe’s world is entrancing, vivid, often harrowing; it’s easy to get
lost in these thickets and fogs, these phantom plantations built on casual
cruelty, these makeshift churches that nurtured collective dreams of
escape...

Shepherds ...

Do you hear the lambs are crying?

Little Axe’s records are wracked with collective grief. Spectral
harmonicas resemble howling wolves; echoes linger like wounds that
will never heal; the voices of the living harmonise with the voices of the
dead in songs thick with reproach, recrimination and the hunger for
redemption. Yet utopian longings also stir in the fetid swamps and
unmarked graveyards; there are moments of unbowed defiance and
fugitive joy here too.

I know my name is written in the Kingdom....

Little Axe is Skip McDonald’s project. Through his involvement with
the likes of Ohio Players, the Sugarhill Gang and Mark Stewart,
McDonald has always been associated with future-orientated pop. If
Little Axe appear at first sight to be a retreat from full-on future shock -
McDonald returning to his first encounter with music, when he learned
blues on his father’s guitar - we are not dealing here the familiar,
tiresome story of a ‘mature’ disavowal of modernism in the name of a re¬
treading of Trad form. In fact, Little Axe’s anachronistic temporality can
be seen as yet another rendering of future shock; except that this time, it
is the vast unassimilable trauma, the SF catastrophe, of slavery that is
being confronted. (Perhaps it always was...)

Even though Little Axe are apt to be described as ‘updating the blues
for the 21st century’ they could equally be seen as downdating the 21st
century into the early 20th. Their dyschronia is reminiscent of those
moments in Stephen King’s It where old photographs come to (a kind of)
life, and there is a hallucinatory suspension of sequentiality. Or, better,
to the time slips in Octavia Butler’s Kindred, where contemporary

characters are abducted back into the waking nightmare of slavery. (The
point being: the nightmare never really ended...)

There is no doubt that blues has a privileged position in pop’s
metaphysics of presence: the image of the singer-songwriter alone with
his guitar provides rockism with its emblem of authenticity and
authorship. But Little Axe’s return to the supposed beginnings unsettles
this by showing that there were ghosts at the origin. Hauntology is the
proper temporal mode for a history made up of gaps, erased names and
sudden abductions. The traces of gospel, spirituals and blues out of
which Stone Cold Ohio is assembled are not the relics of a lost presence,
but the fragments of a time permanently out of joint. These musics were
vast collective works of mourning and melancholia. Little Axe confront
American history as a single ‘empire of crime’, where the War on Terror
decried on Stone Cold Ohio’s opening track - a post 9/11 re-channelling
of Blind Willie Johnson’s ‘If I had My Way’ - is continuous with the
terrordome of slavery.

When I interviewed Skip, he emphasised that Little Axe tracks always
begins with the samples. The origin is out of joint. He has described
before the anachronising Method-ology he uses to transport himself into
the past. ‘I like to surf time. What I like to do is study time-periods - get
right in to ‘em, so deep it gets real heavy in there.’ McDonald’s deep
immersion in old music allows him to travel back in time and the ghosts
to move forward. It is a kind of possession (recalling Winfrey’s claim that
she and the cast were ‘possessed’ when they were making Beloved). Little
Axe’s records skilfully mystify questions of authorship and attribution,
origination and repetition. It is difficult to disentangle sampling from
songwriting, impossible to draw firm lines between a cover version and
an original song. Songs are texturally-dense palimpsests, accreted rather
than authored. McDonald’s own vocals, by turns doleful, quietly enraged
and affirmatory, are often doubled as well as dubbed. They and the
modern instrumentation repeatedly sink into grainy sepia and misty
trails of reverb, falling into a dyschronic contemporeanity with the
crackly samples.

In his landmark piece on Tricky (the piece, really, in which sonic
hauntology was first broached), Ian Penman complained about Greil
Marcus’ ‘measured humanism which leaves little room for the UNCANNY
in music’. Part of the reason Little Axe are intriguing is that their use of

dub makes it possible for us to encounter blues as uncanny and untimely
again. Little Axe position blues not as part of American history, as
Marcus does, but as one corner of the Black Atlantic. What makes the
combination of blues and dub far more than a gimmick is that there is an
uncanny logic behind the superimposition of two corners of the Black
Atlantic over one another.

Adrian Sherwood’s role in the band is crucial. Sherwood has said that
Little Axe take inspiration from the thought that there is a common
ground to be found in ‘the music of Captain Beefheart and Prince Far I,
King Tubby and Jimi Hendrix’. In the wrong hands, a syncresis like this
could end up as a recipe for stodgy, Whole Earth humanism. But
Sherwood is a designer of OtherWorld music, an expert in eeriness, a
kind of anti-Jools Holland. What is most pernicious about Holland is the
way in which, under his stewardship, pop is de-artificialised, re¬
naturalised, blokily traced back to a facialised source. Dub, evidently,
goes in exactly the opposite direction - it estranges the voice, or points
up the voice’s inherent strangeness. When I interviewed Sherwood, he
was delighted by my description of his art as ‘schizophonic’ - Sherwood
detaches sounds from sources, or at least occults the relationship
between the two. The tyranny of Holland’s Later ... has corresponded
with the rise of no-nonsense pop which suppresses the role of recording
and production. But ‘Dub was a breakthrough because the seam of its
recording was turned inside out for us to hear and exult in; when we had
been used to the “re” of recording being repressed, recessed, as though it
really were just a re-presentation of something that already existed in its
own right.’ (Penman)

Hence what I have called dubtraction; and what is subtracted, first of
all, is presence. Pierre Schaeffer’s term for a sound that is detached from
a source is ‘acousmatic’. The dub producer, then, is an acousmatician, a
manipulator of sonic phantoms that have been detached from live
bodies. Dub time is unlive, and the producer’s necromantic role - his
raising of the dead - is doubled by his treating of the living as if dead.
For Little Axe, as for the bluesmen and the Jamaican singers and players
they channel, hauntology is a political gesture: a sign that the dead will
not be silenced.

I’m a prisoner

Somehow I will be free

Nostalgia for Modernism: The Focus Group and

Belbury Poly

‘Myself and my friend Jim Jupp had been making music, independently
and together for a while, and also obsessing over the same things - the
cosmic horror of Machen, Lovecraft, the Radiophonic Workshop, weird
folk and the occult. We realised that we wanted to put our music out,
but also create our own world where we could play with all these
reference points. Starting our own label was the only way to do it.’
Julian House is describing how he and his school-friend Jim Jupp came
to found the Ghost Box label.

Off-kilter bucolic, drenched in an over-exposed post-psyche-delic sun,
Ghost Box recordings are uneasy listening to the letter. If nostalgia
famously means ‘homesickness’, then Ghost Box sound is about
unhomesickness, about the uncanny spectres entering the domestic
environment through the cathode ray tube. At one level, the Ghost Box
is television itself; or a television that has disappeared, itself become a
ghost, a conduit to the Other Side, now only remembered by those of a
certain age. No doubt there comes a point when every generation starts
pining for the artefacts of its childhood - but was there something
special about the TV of the 1970s which Ghost Box releases obsessively
reference?

‘I think there definitely was something powerful about the children’s
TV from that period,’ House maintains. ‘I think it was just after the 60s,
these musicians and animators, film makers had come through the
psychedelic thing and acid folk, they had these strange dark obsessions
that they put into their TV programmes. Also, someone like Nigel Kneale
had obviously come from a tradition of HP Lovecraft - 20th century
science used as a background to cosmic horror and the occult. The
themes he explored in the Quatermass series eventually found their way
into Doctor Who, Children of the Stones , Sapphire and Steel If you look at
the BBC Radiophonic workshop, people like David Cain also studied
medieval music, and he did a great dark folky electronic album called

The Seasons. And a few of Paddy Kingsland’s arrangements bring to mind
Pentangle. It’s like there was this strange past/future thing which had
come through psychedelia.’

The affect produced by Ghost Box’s releases (sound and images, the
latter absolutely integral) are the direct inverse of irritating postmodern
citation-blitz. The mark of the postmodern is the extirpation of the
uncanny, the replacing of the unheimlich tingle of unknowingness with a
cocksure knowingness and hyper-awareness. Ghost Box, by contrast, is a
conspiracy of the half-forgotten, the poorly remembered and the
confabulated. Listening to sample-based sonic genres like Jungle and
early hip-hop you typically found yourself experiencing deja vudu or deja
entendu, in which a familiar sound, estranged by sampling, nagged just
beyond recognisability. Ghost Box releases conjure a sense of artificial
deja vu, where you are duped into thinking that what you are hearing
has its origin somewhere in the late 60s or early 70s: not false, but
simulated, memory. The spectres in Ghost Box’s hauntology are the lost
contexts which, we imagine, must have prompted the sounds we are
hearing: forgotten programmes, uncommissioned series, pilots that were
never followed-up.

Belbury Poly, The Focus Group, Eric Zann - names from an alternative
70s that never ended, a digitally-reconstructed world in which analogue
rules forever, a time-scrambled Moorcockian near-past. This return to
the analogue via the digital is one of the ways in which Ghost Box
records are not straight-up simulations of the past. ‘We like to confuse
the boundaries between analogue and digital. Jim uses a combination of
analogue synths and digital technology. In the Focus Group stuff there
are samples of old percussion albums and digital effects, electronic
sounds generated on the computer and processed found sounds. I think
it’s do with this space between what happens in the computer and what
happens outside of it. The recording of space, real reverb/room sound
and the virtual space on the hard drive. Like different dimensions.’

‘It was bang on 1980 when Fairlights and DX7s appeared in electronic
music,’ Jupp points out. ‘I suppose that digital technology is a tipping
point in culture in general, even in the way that television is made.’ Yet
Belbury Poly’s sound relies on digital equipment. ‘At the heart of it is a
computer and we don’t hide that fact. Having said that, I’m sitting in the
studio now and it’s mostly analogue synths and a pile of acoustic

instruments, what we do couldn’t exist without hip-hop and sampling
culture and the access to cheap electronic instruments. It’s revisiting old
textures and old imagined worlds with new tools.’

Jupp laughs when I suggest that there was a certain grain to 70s
British culture that got smoothed away by 80s style culture gloss. ‘It’s
almost as if we became totally Americanised, got our teeth fixed and had
a proper wash. I was talking to someone the other day whose girlfriend
can’t stand him watching old sitcoms, she always calls it grot TV. I know
what she means. But maybe in TV, radio and records then there was a
feel that was washed clean in the 80s when everything was angular,
digital, American, upbeat and colourful.’

Ghost Box explore a sonic continuum which stretches from the
quirkily cheery to the insinuatingly sinister. The most obvious
predecessors lie in ‘functional music’, sounds designed to hover at the
edge of perceptibility, not to hog centre-stage: signature tunes, incidental
music, music that is instantly recognizable but whose authors, more
often (self-)styled as technicians rather than artists, remain anonymous.
The Radiophonic Workshop (whose two ‘stars’, Delia Derbyshire and
Daphne Oram, became widely recognised only after their deaths) would
be the obvious template. House agrees: ‘I think the key reference is the
Radiophonic Workshop, which is wildly experimental (Britain’s
electronic avant garde, the equivalent of GRM Pierre Schaeffer in France
etc.) but it’s also incredibly evocative of radio and television with which
we grew up. It’s got a sort of duality to it, it’s haunting in its own right
but also serves as a memory trigger. I think this dim, half remembered
aspect of old Hammer films, Doctor Who, Quatermass is important - it’s
not like an I Love 1974 reminiscence. Rather than being just nostalgia,
it’s triggering something darker, you’re remembering the strange ideas in
these programmes, the stuff under the surface, rather than just knowing
the theme tune. I think this is why Library music is such an influence -
you listen to the albums divorced from context and it operates on an
unconscious level, like musical cues for missing visuals.

When I grew up Doctor Who episodes like The Sea Devils haunted me,
the way slightly shaky monsters and sets have their own uncanny horror.
The loud blasts of Atonal music. The first time I saw the Hammer film of
Quatermass and the Pit really affected me. And those dimly remembered
eastern European animations had a certain quality. Also, certain public

information films and adverts.’

Ghost Box preside over a (slightly) alternative world in which the
Radiophonic Workshop were more important than the Beatles. In a sense
that is our world, because the Workshop rendered even the most
experimental rock obsolete even before it had happened. But of course
you are not comparing like with like here; the Beatles occupied front
stage in the Pop Spectacle, whereas the Radiophonic Workshop
insinuated their jingles, idents, themes and special FX into the weft of
everyday life. The Workshop was properly unheimlich, unhomely,
fundamentally tied up with a domestic environment that had been
invaded by media.

Naturally, Ghost Box have been accused of nostalgia, and of course
this plays a part in their appeal. But their aesthetic in fact exhibits a
more paradoxical impulse: in a culture dominated by retrospection, what
they are nostalgic for is nothing less than (popular) modernism itself.
Ghost Box are at their most beguiling when they foreground dyschronia,
broken time - as on Belbury Poly’s ‘Caermaen’ (from 2004’s The Willows)
and ‘Wetland’ (from 2006’s The Owl’s Map) where folk voices summoned
from beyond the grave are made to sing new songs. Dyschronia is
integral to the Focus Group’s whole methodology; the joins are too
audible, the samples too jagged, for their tracks to sound like refurbished
artefacts.

In any case, at their best, Ghost Box conjure a past that never was.
Their artwork fuses the look of comprehensive school text books and
public service manuals with allusions to weird fiction, a fusion that has
more to do with the compressions and conflations of dreamwork than
with memory. House himself talks of ‘a strange dream of a school
textbook’. The implicit demand for such a space in Ghost Box inevitably
reminds us that the period since 1979 in Britain has seen the gradual but
remorseless destruction of the very concept of the public. At the same
time, Ghost Box also remind us that the people who worked in the
Radiophonic Workshop were effectively public servants, that they were
employed to produce a weird public space - a public space very different
from the bureaucratic dreariness invoked by neoliberal propaganda.

Public space has been consumed and replaced by something like the
third place exemplified by franchise coffee bars. These spaces are
uncanny only in their power to replicate sameness, and the monotony of

the Starbucks environment is both reassuring and oddly disorientating;
inside the pod, it’s possible to literally forget what city you are in. What
I have called nomadalgia is the sense of unease that these anonymous
environments, more or less the same the world over, provoke; the travel
sickness produced by moving through spaces that could be anywhere.
My, I... what happened to Our Space, or the idea of a public that was
not reducible to an aggregate of consumer preferences?

In Ghost Box, the lost concept of the public has a very palpable
presence-in-absence, via samples of public service announcements.
(Incidentally one connection between rave and Ghost Box is the
Prodigy’s sampling of this kind of announcement on ‘Charly’.) Public
service announcements - remembered because they could often be
disquieting, particularly for children - constitute a kind of reservoir of
collective unconscious material. The disinterment of such broadcasts
now cannot but play as the demand for a return of the very concept of
public service. Ghost Box repeatedly invoke public bodies - through
names (Belbury Poly, the Advisory Circle) and also forms (the tourist
brochure, the textbook).

Confronted with capital’s intense semiotic pollution, its encrustation of
the urban environment with idiotic sigils and imbecilic slogans no-one -
neither the people who wrote them nor those at whom they are aimed -
believes, you often wonder: what if all the effort that went into this
flashy trash were devoted to a public good? If for no other reason, Ghost
Box is worth treasuring because they make us pose that question with
renewed force.

The Ache of Nostalgia:
The Advisory Circle

‘The Advisory Circle - helping you make the right decisions With its
suggestions of a benevolent bureaucracy, The Advisory Circle was
always the perfect name for a Ghost Box act. On Mind How You Go
(2005), producer and vinyl archivist Jon Brooks produced a kind of
Anglo-analogue pastoralism that is as affecting as anything that the label
has released. In what has since been established to be the customary
Ghost Box fashion, Brooks’s analogue synthesizer doodles - all the more
powerful, somehow, for their unassuming slightness - gently trigger
drifts down (false) memory lanes, inducing you to recall a mass
mediated past which you never quite experienced. Mind How You Go
frequently invokes that talisman of 1970s paternalism, the Public
Information Film, and it’s perhaps no accident that the rise of Ghost Box
has coincided with the emergence of YouTube, which has made public
information films and other such street furniture of 1970s audio-visual
experience widely available again.

What Brooks captures extremely poignantly is the conflicted cluster of
emotions involved in nostalgic longing. ‘Mind How You Go’ and ‘Nuclear
Substation’ summon remembered sunlight from childhood summers even
as their doleful melodies are laced with a deep sense of loss. Yet there’s a
very definite but subdued joy here, too, in the way that a track such as
‘Osprey’ achieves a kind of faltering soaring. It’s not for nothing that the
word ache is often associated with nostalgia; and The Advisory Circle’s
music positively aches with a sadness that is simultaneously painful and
enjoyable. 201 l’s As The Crow Flies felt folkier than The Advisory Circle’s
previous releases, with acoustic guitars creeping over the analogue
synthesizers like ivy spreading over the frontage of a brutalist building.
The album’s closing track, ‘Lonely Signalman’, brings these different
textures together beautifully: its vocodered refrain (‘signalman lives all
alone/ signalman is all alone’) is simultaneously playful and plangent, a
combination that is typical of Brooks’s work. I asked Brooks about the

roots of the exquisite sadness that colours his music.

‘A lot of it stems from my childhood. Without wishing to go too far
down the ‘tortured artist’ path, I will say that my upbringing was a
cyclic period of safety, security, contentment, anxiety, despair and
sadness. As an adult, I’ve managed to work through a lot of these
childhood feelings and channel them into what I’m doing musically.
Thankfully, I can now make sense of a lot of stuff that happened back
then; I can balance this against any residual scars I might be left with.
I’m not saying I’m glad that I had a turbulent childhood, but for what it’s
worth, it has shaped my art, quite indelibly.’

A paradoxical impulse lies behind Brooks’s work. He is fascinated by
functional culture - that which we don’t consciously hear or see but
which shapes our experience of environments - yet the attention on
what was background necessarily pushes it into the foreground. 201 l’s
Music For Dieter Rams, a homage to the designer best known for his work
with Braun released under Brooks’s name, was an attempt to bring
functional music together with functional design. Rams’s slogan ‘less, but
better’ could equally apply to the original conception of Ambient music.
After all, What was the ambition for Ambient if not that music attain the
unassuming ubiquity of many of Rams’s products - all those radios,
coffee makers and calculators which were embedded into everyday life,
their designer unknown to the general public? Perhaps for that reason,
Brooks isn’t the first artist to dedicate music to Rams: Alva Noto devoted
two wonderfully eerie tracks on his For 2 album to the designer. It’s
those things lurking at the background of attention, things that we took
for granted at the time, which now evoke the past most powerfully.

‘With hindsight,’ Brooks says, ‘the fact that these things are so
evocative of the past, accentuates and crystallises my interest in them;
but actually, I’ve always been interested in things ‘in the background’ -
for me, that’s where the really interesting stuff has always been. As a
kid, I was equally fascinated by library music used on TV (or TV themes)
as I was about pop music; things that we weren’t supposed to take any
real notice of. I used to look out for TV test transmissions, for example,
and of course Public Information Films. Open University broadcasts held
the same fascination; these broadcasts weren’t targeted at an eight-year-
old child, but I was drawn towards them nonetheless. I was also drawn
to logos, branding and so forth. I remember being particularly entranced

by certain record labels’ logos - Polydor, Decca and Pye were my
favourites. I loved the way they looked on the records and would quite
often sit at the turntable and watch them go round, as the record played.
There was something very elegant about them. Again, these things were
presented as ‘functional’, in their own way. So, the fascination was
always there. It’s just stayed with me.’

Those objects and spaces are also functional. Is Brooks particularly
fascinated by culture that operates in this ostensibly functional way?

‘I am absolutely fascinated by that aspect. At the risk of being slightly
tangential, taking the concept of Muzak as an example, I very much
enjoyed reading Joseph Lanza’s Elevator Music. This is a great example of
bringing the background to the foreground, in the form of strictly
‘functional’ music. It goes a step further in this respect than even Library
music does. I have always been fascinated by the cultural aspect of this -
how we can have small speakers installed in ceilings in shops and the
music just filters through and no-one is really supposed to notice; they
called it ‘non-entertainment music’ at the time. Muzak gained a really
bad reputation in the 1970s, but if you go back and listen to some of the
music that was produced for the system, you’ll find some very tight,
compact arrangements hidden in there. Composers that are highly
regarded by record collectors now, for example Sven Libaek and Syd
Dale, did a lot of work for Muzak. In much the same way, I apply this
fascination to domestic design or motorway service stations. Dieter Rams
was interested in creating something that just worked, with elegance and
simplicity. I love the fact that he wasn’t searching for fame with his
designs, but now we can celebrate those designs publicly and hand him
the spotlight, as it were, in much the same way as we have discovered
composers like Sven Libaek.’

Someone Else’s Memories: Asher,
Philip Jeck, Black To Comm, G.E.S.,
Position Normal, Mordant Music

In 2009, an artist known as Asher released an album called Miniatures on
the Sourdine label. The only information on the sleeve was the following
terse statement: ‘recorded in Somerville, MA, winter 2007’. Rumours and
mysteries proliferate in a data vacuum, and Miniatures puts the listener
into a state of suspension and suspicion: what exactly are we listening
to? Who made it? What does ‘making’ it mean in this context? And what
sense of ‘recorded’ is being used?

Let’s consider the audio facts, such as they are. Even here there is
veiling - all the tracks are covered in a fog of crackle. What we hear is
mostly piano, although occasionally strings can also be detected. The
piano is contemplative, reflective, exquisitely sad: the lugubrious tempo
seems to literalise the notion of longing. The haze of the crackle and the
quietness of the playing mean that you have to ‘lean in’ to hear the
music - played on ipod headphones, it practically disappears into the
background noise of the street.

How were the tracks made? At least two theories circulated online.
One, the closest there seems to be to any official story, maintains that
the tracks on Miniatures were all short sections recorded by Asher from
the radio and then digitally looped. (If so, he should buy himself a radio
with better reception.) The other theory is that the piano pieces were
played by Asher on poor quality tape, then subjected to further processes
of digital distortion to give the impression that they are found sound
objects. The tracks’ unresolved status is not some dry conceptual riddle
detracting from the experience of listening to them; instead, the enigma
actually heightens the music’s fragile, fragmentary beauty, its uncanny
intimacy.

Miniatures was one of a number of records from the 00s whose sound
centred on crackle. Why should crackle resonate now? The first thing we
can say is that crackle exposes a temporal pathology: it makes ‘out of

joint’ time audible. Crackle both invokes the past and marks out our
distance from it, destroying the illusion that we are co-present with what
we are hearing by reminding us we are listening to a recording. Crackle
now calls up a whole disappeared regime of materiality - a tactile
materiality, lost to us in an era where the sources of sound have
retreated from sensory apprehension. Artists like Tricky, Basic Channel
and Pole started to foreground vinyl crackle at the very moment when
records were becoming superseded. Back then, it was the CD that was
making vinyl obsolete. Now, the MP3 can neither be seen nor touched,
still less manipulated by the hand in the way that the vinyl record could
be.

The digital seems to promise nothing less than an escape from
materiality itself, and the story of Wiliam Basinski’s 2002 album
Disintegration Loops - a recording of tapes that destroyed themselves in
the very process of their transfer to digital - is a parable (almost too
perfect) for the switch from the fragility of analogue to the infinite
replicability of digital. What we have lost, it can often seem, is the very
possibility of loss. Digital archiving means that the fugitive evanescence
that long ago used to characterise, for instance, the watching of
television programmes - seen once, and then only remembered - has
disappeared. Indeed, it turns out that experiences which we thought
were forever lost can - thanks to the likes of YouTube - not only be
recovered, but endlessly repeated.

Crackle, then, connotes the return of a certain sense of loss. At the
same time, it is also the sign of a found (audio) object, the indication
that we are in a scavenger’s space. That is why crackle is a stock-in-trade
of someone like turntable artist Philip Jeck. Jeck’s first record had
appeared in 1999, but his work gained a new currency because of its
convergence with what Burial and The Caretaker were doing. Jeck had
been inspired by hearing mixers like Walter Gibbons, Larry Levan and
Grandmaster Flash in the 80s, but his montages reconceive DJing as the
art of producing sonic phantasmagoria. Using Dansette turntables, FX
units and records found in charity shops, Jeck defamiliarises the vinyl
source material to the point of near-abstraction. Occasionally,
recognizable fragments (60s rock, Mantovani-like lite classical kitsch)
thrillingly bob up out of the whooshing delirium-stream.

Jeck began the extraordinary 2008 version of Gavin Bryars’ The

Sinking of the Titanic (which he performed in collaboration with Italian
ensemble Alter Ego and Bryars himself) with nearly 14 minutes of
crackle. In this audio-fog, threatening objects loom, barely perceived. As
we listen, we come to distrust our own hearing, begin to lose confidence
in our ability to distinguish what is actually there from audio
hallucinations. Ominous strings and a solitary bell produce an
atmosphere of quiet foreboding, and the ensemble - at first indistinct
shadows in a Turner-esque squall - only gradually emerge from the
cloud of crepitation. Here, as in Asher’s Miniatures, crackle suggests radio
static. The sinking of the Titanic in fact prompted the first use of wireless
in sea rescue. As Bryars points out in his sleevenotes, Marconi had
conceived of telegraphy as a spectral science. He ‘became convinced that
sounds once generated never die, they simply become fainter and fainter
until we no longer perceive them. Marconi’s hope was to develop
sufficiently sensitive equipment, extraordinarily powerful and selective
filters I suppose, to pick up and hear these past sounds. Ultimately, he
hoped to be able hear Christ delivering the Sermon on the Mount.’

Jeck has referred to the sonic sources he uses as ‘fragments of
memory, triggering associations’ but it is crucial that the memories are
not necessarily his; the effect is sometimes like sifting through a box of
slides, photographs and postcards from anonymous people, long gone.
This same feeling of coming upon other people’s orphaned memories
could be heard in the 2009 album Circulations by G.E.S. (Gesellschaft zur
Emanzipation des Samples/ Society For The Emancipation Of Sampling).
There is some mystery about who is behind G.E.S., but the project
appears to be a front for genre-hopping dilettante Jan Jelinek, best
known for his Loop-finding Jazz Records, which constructed a version of
minimal Techno out of minuscule jazz samples; Jelinek has also
produced microhouse under the name Farben and Ambient as Gramm.
G.E.S.’s idea was to take micro-samples, loop and collage them, play
them in public spaces, and record the results. Would the ordinary laws of
copyright apply if music was sampled in these conditions? The tracks are
like unsigned audio-postcards, recorded sometimes in named places
(Mount Zermatt and Hong Kong are mentioned in the track titles),
sometimes in places we can only guess at, using the voices and
background noises to orientate ourselves. ‘Birds Of Heraklion’ begins
with distorted electronic pulses before being swept up by a backwards

rush of very cinematic strings that sound like they might have come
from a black and white film extolling the benefits of train travel.
‘Orinoco, Bullerbii, (Crossfade) ’ is initially built from the violent
juxtaposition of crazed bird noises with what could be a sample from
some forgotten film noir or a highly strung melodrama, but it ends with
echoes, and strange, abstract whistles. ‘Im Schilf’ puts one in mind of the
kind of alien piping noises you would hear in an Oliver Postgate
animation or an early Cabaret Voltaire tape experiment, while
‘Farnballett’ and ‘Farnballett (In Dub)’ recall a Binatone tennis game
having a HAL-like nervous breakdown. The random sounds, the passing
conversations, make you feel like you are witnessing stray frames from a
film no whole version of which exists anywhere. This sense that action is
continuing beyond what we are hearing, together with the record’s
travelogue-cosmopolitanism, remind me of nothing so much as the cold,
dislocated beauty of Antonioni’s The Passenger. The closing track, ‘Schlaf
(Nach Einfuhrung Der Psychoanalyse)’ - which sounds like windchimes
on some dust-blown alien planet - is like a memory of a Cold War
science fiction that never quite happened. What stops this being a dry
exercise or a disparate melange is the inescapable sense of anonymous
sadness which pervades the whole record.

This same sense of depersonalised tragedy hung over Alphabet 1968,
the 2010 album by Black to Comm, aka Marc Richter, the man behind
the ‘death Ambient’ genre and the Hamburg-based Dekorder label.
Richter mischievously described Alphabet 1968 - on which the only
human voices are on field recordings at the edge of audibility - as an
album of songs. What if we were to take Richter’s provocation seriously -
what would a song without a singer be like? What would it be like, that
is to say, if objects themselves could sing? It’s a question that connects
fairy tales with cybernetics, and listening to Alphabet 1968, I’m fittingly
reminded of a filmic space in which magic and mechanism meet: J F
Sebastian’s apartment in Blade Runner. The tracks on the album are
crafted with the same minute attention to detail that the genetic
designer and toymaker Sebastian brought to his plaintive automata, with
their bizarre mixture of the clockwork and the computerised, the antique
and the ultramodern, the playful and the sinister. Richter’s pieces have
been built from similarly heterogeneous materials - record crackle,
shortwave radio, glockenspiels, all manner of samples, mostly of acoustic

instruments. Except on ‘Void’ - a steampunk John Carpenter-like track
with susurrating voices conspiring in the background - the music does
not feel very electronic. As with Sebastian’s talking machines, you get
the impression that Richter has used the latest technology in order to
create the illusion of archaism. This is a record in which you feel that
you can smell the dust coming off the retrieved objects. But so intricately
are these sonic palimpsests layered that it’s impossible to determine
what Richter and his collaborators have played and what has been
conjured from the archives. The sounds are treated, reversed and slowed
down in a way that makes their original sources mysterious. There is a
sense of subtle but constant movement, of sound shadows flitting in and
out of earshot.

Richter so successfully effaces himself as author that it is as if he has
snuck into a room and recorded objects as they played (to) themselves.
On the opening track, ‘Jonathan’, crackle, a field recording of drizzle and
cut-aways to white noise set the scene for a pensive piano. Children’s
voices can be heard in the distance, and it is like we are being ushered
out of the human world into the mysterious world of objects-amongst-
themselves, a world just adjacent to ours, yet utterly foreign to it. It is as
if Richter has attuned himself to the subterranean raptures and sadnesses
of objects in unoccupied rooms, and it is these ‘songs’ that he hears. It’s
not for nothing that the theme of objects coming to life was taken up so
often in cinema animation (for, as its name suggests, what is animation
if not a version of this process?), and most of the tracks on Alphabet 1968
could be tunes for cartoon sequences - the ‘song’ an object sings as it
stirs itself into motion, or declines back into inertia.

In fact, the impression of things winding down is persistent on
Alphabet 1968. Richter has made an enchanted sound-world, but one
from which entropy has not been excluded. It feels as if the magic is
always about to wear off, that the enchanted objects will slip back into
the inanimate again at any moment - an effect which only heightens the
tracks’ poignancy. The labouring, looped double bass on ‘Rauschen’ has
all the mechano-melan-choly of a phonograph winding down - or
perhaps of one of Sebastian’s automata running out of power. On
‘Trapez’, reverbed wind chimes create a gentle Narnian snowfall. As so
often on this album, the track recalls a running-down music box - one
parallel might be Colleen’s 2006 album Boites a Musique, except that,

where Colleen restricted herself to actually using music boxes, Richter
loops and sequences his sonic material so that it simulates clockwork. But
it’s an uncanny clockwork, running to a crooked time. On ‘Amateur’ -
with its hints of artificial respiration, as if the walls themselves are
breathing - the piano loop seems bent out of shape.

Entropy is everywhere in the work of Position Normal, an act whom
Simon Reynolds once called ‘the godfathers of hauntology’, but it is a
very English kind of entropy. In Position Normal’s music, it is like
London has finally succumbed to the entropy that always threatens to
engulf the city in Michael Moorcock’s Jerry Cornelius mythos. Except
there’s something attractive about the deep day dreamy lassitude that
reigns here: entropy isn’t a threat so much as a lysergic promise, a
chance to uncoil, unwind, unspool. Gradually, you are made to forget all
of your urgencies as your brain is lulled and lured into the sunny Sunday
afternoon when all Position Normal tunes seem to take place. The allure
of this indolent London was touched upon by a certain trajectory in 60s’
rock: the sunny daze of The Kinks’ ‘Sunny Afternoon’, The Small Faces
‘Lazy Sunday Afternoon’, The Beatles’ ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ and ‘I’m
Only Sleeping’. Yet this particular strand of Anglo-languor didn’t
originate here, in the acid and weed reveries of rockers in repose. You
can look even further back for antecedents, to moments in Great
Expectations - the airless, inertial stasis of Satis House - or to Alice’s
Adventures in Wonderland (especially well captured in the hookah-hazes
and fugues of Jonathan Miller’s 1968 BBC television version).

Position Normal’s London is a city far distant from the corporate gloss
of busy/ business London as it is from the tourist London of pageantry.
The tour guide for this anachronistic city would be the James Mason in
The London That Nobody Knows, the 1969 film directed by Norman
Cohen and based on the book by Geoffrey Fletcher. It’s a palimpsest city,
a space where many times are layered. Sometimes, when you walk down
an unfamiliar street, you might stumble into aspects of it. Street markets
that you’d imagined had closed long ago, shops that (so you think)
couldn’t possibly survive into the 21 st century, ripe old voices fit only for
the Victorian music hall...

Position Normal’s tracks are Dadaist dub-doodles, disarming in their
seeming slightness. They feel like skits or sketches;
unwilling to be seen taking themselves too seriously, but at the same

time entirely lacking in knowing smirks. There’s a daydreamy quality to
the way the music is constructed: ideas waft in but trail off
inconclusively while still half-baked. It can be frustrating, at least
initially, yet the effect is accretive and seductive. A Position Normal
album comes off like an anglo -Fantasia scavenged out of charity shops,
all the detritus of the English 20th century made to sing. For the most
part, you are left to guess the sources of all the funny voices. Who are
they, this cheery gang - children’s radio presenters, comedians,
character actors, light entertainers, newsreel announcers, jazz trumpeters
(mutes always at the ready), ragpickers, costermongers, chancers, idlers,
thespians gone to seed, frothy coffee cafe proprietors...? And where have
they come from - scratchy old shellac, unmarked tapes, soundtrack LPs?
The tracks bleed into one another, and so do the albums, like failing
memories.

It turns out that decaying memory is at the heart of Position Normal’s
music. In an interview with Joakim Norling for Friendly Noise magazine,
Position Normal’s Chris Bailiff has said that the roots of the PN sound lay
in his father’s Alzheimer’s disease. ‘My dad went into hospital and had to
sell the family home, I had to move out and whilst doing this I found so
many old records of his and records that he bought for me. Nursery
rhymes, documentaries and jazz. I didn’t want to throw anything away
so took them with me. I started to listen to all of them and recorded on
to tape my favourite sounds and made incredibly varied mix tapes. I
then edited them down and down until there were what I suppose are
called samples.’ It’s as if Bailiff was simultaneously attempting to
simulate Alzheimer’s and counteract it.

Position Normal can be fitted into the venerable English tradition of
Nonsense. (Another Small Faces parallel: Stanley Unwin provided some
of his trademark gobbledygook for Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake, the album
which included ‘Lazy Sunday Afternoon’.)

This same sense of lyrical dementia is at work on Mordant Music’s
2006 masterpiece Dead Air. Mordant explicitly affirm decay and
deliquescence as productive processes, and on Dead Air it is as if the
mould growing on the archives is the creative force behind the sound.
The album sounds like an electro/Rave version of The Disintegration
Loops, except what was disintegrating here was a moment in British
broadcasting history. The loose concept behind the album was a dead

television studio, and what’s crucial to its unnerving allure is the
presence of former Thames TV continuity announcer Phillip Elsmore.
There’s a lunatic calm about the way that Elsmore reading Baron
Mordant’s Nonsense (best heard in its own right on his collaboration
with Ekoplekz, eMMplekz). Listening to Dead Air is like stumbling into
an abandoned museum 200 years into the future where old Rave tracks
play on an endless loop, degrading, becoming more contaminated with
each repetition; or like being stranded in deep space, picking up fading
radio signals from a far distant earth to which you will never return; or
like memory itself re-imagined as an oneiric television studio, where
fondly recalled continuity announcers, drifting in and out of audibility,
narrate your nightmares in reassuring tones.

‘Old Sunlight From Other Times and Other
Lives’: John Foxx’s Tiny Colour Movies

k-punk post, June 19, 2006

He was in the market crowds, wearing a shabby brown suit. Trying to
find me through all the years. My ghost coming home. How do you get
home through all the years? No passport, no photo possible. No
resemblance to anyone living or dead. Tenderly peering into windows

John Foxx’s Tiny Colour Movies is a welcome addition to this decade’s
rich cache of hauntological releases.

Foxx’s music has always had an intimate relationship with film. Like
sound recording, photography - with its capturing of lost moments, its
presentation of absences - has an inherently hauntological dimension. It
wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that Foxx’s entire musical career has
been about relating the hauntology of the visual with the hauntology of
sound, transposing the eerie calmness and stillness of photography and
painting onto the passional agitation of rock.

In the case of Tiny Colour Movies, the relationship between the visual
and the sonic is an explicit motivating factor. The inspiration for the
album was the film collection of Arnold Weizcs-Bryant. Weizcs-Bryant
collects only films that are short - no movie in his collection is longer
than eight minutes long - and that have been ‘made outside commercial
consideration for the sheer pleasure of film. This category can include
found film, the home movie, the repurposed movie fragment.’ The album
emerged when, a few weeks after he attended a showing of some of
Weizcs-Bryant films in Baltimore, Foxx found himself unable to forget
‘the beauty and strangeness’ of Weizcs-Bryant’s movies - ‘juxtapositions
of underwater automobiles, the highways of Los Angeles, movies made
from smoke and light, discarded surveillance footage from 1964 New
York hotel rooms’ - so he decided ‘to give in to it - to see what would

happen if [he] made a small collection of musical pieces using the
memory of those Tiny Colour Movies.’

The result is Foxx’s most (un)timely LP since 1980’s Metamatic. Tiny
Colour Movies fits right into the out of joint time of hauntology. Belbury
Poly’s Jim Jupp cites Metamatic as a major touchstone, and time has bent
so that the influence and the influenced now share an uncanny
contemporaneity. Certainly, many of the tracks on Tiny Colour Movies -
synthetic but oneiric, psychedelic but artificial - resemble Ghost Box
releases. This is an electronic sound removed from the hustle and bustle
of the present. An obvious comparison for a track like the majestically
mournful ‘Skyscraper’ would be Vangelis’ Blade Runner soundtrack, but,
in the main, the synthetic textures are relieved from the pressure of
signifying the Future. Instead, they evoke a timeless Now where the
urgencies of the present have been suspended. Some of the best tracks -
especially the closing quartet of ‘Shadow City’, ‘Interlude’, ‘Thought
Experiment’ and ‘Hand Held Skies’ - are slivers of sheer atmosphere,
delicate and slight. They are gateways to what Heronbone used to call
‘slowtime’, a time of meditative detachment from the commotions of the
current.

I constantly feel a distant kind of longing. The longest song, the song
of longing. I walk the same streets like a fading ghost. Flickering grey
suit. The same avenues, squares, parks, colonnades, like a ghost. Over
the years I find places I can go through, some process of recognition.
Remnants of other almost forgotten places. Always returning.

Tiny Colour Movies is a distillation of an aesthetic Foxx has dedicatedly
explored since Ultravox’s Systems of Romance. Although Foxx is most
associated with a future-shocked amnesiac catatonia (‘I used to
remember/ now it’s all gone/ world war something/ we were
somebody’s sons’), there has always been another trance-mode - more
beatific and gently blissful, but no less impersonal or machinic -
operative in Foxx’s sound, even on the McLuhanite Metamatic.

Psychedelia had explicitly emerged as a reference point on Systems of
Romance (1978) - particularly on tracks such as ‘When You Walk
Through Me’ and ‘Maximum Acceleration’, with their imagery of

liquifying cities and melting time (‘locations change/ the angles change/
even the streets get re-arranged’). There might have been the occasional
nod to the psychedelia of the past - ‘When You Walk Through Me’ stole
the drum pattern from ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ for instance - but
Systems of Romance was remarkable for its attempt to repeat psychedelia
‘in-becoming’ rather than through plodding re-iteration. Foxx’s
psychedelia was sober, clean-shaven, dressed in smartly anonymous
Magritte suits; its locale, elegantly overgrown cities from the dreams of
Wells, Delvaux and Ernst.

The reference to Delvaux and Ernst is not idle, since Foxx’s songs, like
Ballard’s stories and novels, often seemed to take place inside Surrealist
paintings. This is not only a matter of imagery, but also of mood and
tone (or, catatone); there is a certain languor, a radically depersonalised
serenity on loan from dreams here. ‘If anything,’ Ballard wrote in his
1966 essay on Surrealism, ‘Coming of the Unconscious’, ‘surrealist
painting has one dominant characteristic: a glassy isolation, as if all the
objects in its landscapes had been drained of their emotional
associations, the accretions of sentiment and common usage.’ It’s not
surprising that Surrealism should so often turn up as a reference in
psychedelia’s ‘derangement of the senses’.

The derangement in Foxx’s psychedelia has always been a gentle
affair, disquieting in its very quietude. That is perhaps because the
machinery of perceptual re-engineering seemed to be painting,
photography and fiction more than drugs per se. One suspects that the
psychotropic agent most active on/in Foxx’s sensibility is light As he
explained in an interview from 1983: ‘some people at certain times seem
to have a light inside them, it’s just a feeling you get about someone, it’s
kind of radiance - and it’s something that’s always intrigued me - it’s
something I’ve covered before in songs like ‘Slow Motion’ and ‘When
You Walk Through Me’. I like that feeling of calm...It’s like William
Burroughs summed it up perfectly - “I had a feeling of stillness and
wonder.’”

There is a clear Gnostic dimension to this. For the Gnostics, the World
was both heavy and dark, and you got a glimpse of the Outside through
glimmers and shimmers (two recurrent words in Foxx’s vocabulary).
Around the time of Systems of Romance, Foxx’s cover art shifted from
harsh Warhol/Heartfield cut/paste towards gentle detournements of

Renaissance paintings. What Foxx appeared to discover in Da Vinci and
Botticelli is a Catholicism divested not only of pagan carnality but of the
suffering figure of Christ, and returned to an impersonal Gnostic
encounter with radiance and luminescence.

What is suppressed in postmodern culture is not the Dark but the Light
side. We are far more comfortable with demons than angels. Whereas
the demonic appears cool and sexy, the angelic is deemed to be
embarrassing and sentimental. (Wim Wenders’ excruciatingly cloying
and portentous Wings of Desire is perhaps the most spectacular failed
contemporary attempt to render the angelic.) Yet, as Rudolf Otto
establishes in The Idea of the Holy, encounters with angels are as
disturbing, traumatic and overwhelming as encounters with demons.
After all, what could be more shattering, unassimilable and
incomprehensible in our hyper-stressed, constantly disappointing and
overstimulated lives, than the sensation of calm joy? Otto, a conservative
Christian, argued that all religious experience has its roots in what is
initially misrecognised as ‘daemonic dread’; he saw encounters with
ghosts, similarly, as a perverted version of what the Christian person
would experience religiously. But Otto’s account is an attempt to fit the
abstract and traumatic encounter with ‘angels’ and ‘demons’ into a
settled field of meaning.

Otto’s word for religious experience is the numinous. But perhaps we
can rescue the numinous from the religious. Otto delineates many
variants of the numinous; the most familiar to us now would be ‘spasms
and convulsions’ leading to ‘the strangest excitements, to intoxicated
frenzy, to transport, and to ecstasy’. But far more uncanny in the ultra-
agitated, present is that mode of the numinous which ‘come(s) sweeping
like a gentle tide, pervading the mind with a tranquil mood of deepest
worship.’ Foxx’s instrumental music - on Tiny Colour Movies and on the
three Cathedral Oceans CDs, and with Harold Budd on the Transluscence
and Drift Music LPs - has been eerily successful in rendering this alien
tranquillity. On Transluscence in particular, where Budd’s limpid piano
chords hang like dust subtly diffusing in sunlight, you can feel your
nervous system slowing to a reptile placidity. This is not an inner but
Outer calm; not a discovery of a cheap New Age ‘real’ self, but a positive
alienation, in which the cold pastoral freezing into a tableau is
experienced as a release from identity.

Dun Scotus’ concept of the haecceity - the ‘here and now’ - seems
particularly apposite here. Deleuze and Guattari seize upon this in A
Thousand Plateaus as a depersonalised mode of individuation in which
everything - the breath of the wind, the quality of the light - plays a
part. A certain use of film - think, particularly, of the aching stillness in
Kubrick and Tarkovsky - seems especially set up to attune us to
haecceity; as does the polaroid, a capturing of a haecceity which is itself
a haecceity.

The impersonal melancholy that Tiny Colour Movies produces is similar
to the oddly wrenching affect you get from a website like Found Photos.
It is precisely the decontextualised quality of these images, the fact that
there is a discrepancy between the importance that the people in the
photographs place upon what is happening and its complete irrelevance
to us, which produces a charge that can be quietly overwhelming. Foxx
wrote about this effect in his deeply moving short story, ‘The Quiet
Man’. The figure is alone in a depopulated London, watching home
movies made by people he never knew. ‘He was fascinated by all the
tiny intimate details of these films, the jerky figures waving from seaside
and garden at weddings and birthdays and baptisms, records of whole
families and their pets growing and changing through the years.’

‘Here you see old sunlight from other times and other lives’, Foxx
observes in his evocative sleevenotes for Tiny Colour Movies. To leaf
through other people’s family photos, to see moments that were of intense
emotional significance for them but which mean nothing to you, is,
necessarily, to reflect on the times of high drama in your own life, and to
achieve a kind of distance that is at once dispassionate and powerfully
affecting. That is why the - beautifully, painfully - dilated moment in
Tarkovsky’s Stalker where the camera lingers over talismanic objects that
were once saturated with meaning, but are now saturated only with
water is for me the most moving scene in cinema. It is as if we are seeing
the urgencies of our lives through the eyes of an Alien-God. Otto claims
that the sense of the numinous is associated with feelings of our own
fundamental worthlessness, experienced with a ‘piercing acuteness [and]
accompanied by the most uncompromising judgment of self¬
depreciation’. But, contrary to today’s ego psychology, which hectors us
into reinforcing our sense of self (all the better to ‘sell ourselves’), the
awareness of our own Nothingness is of course a pre-requisite for a

feeling of grace. There is a melancholy dimension to this grace precisely
because it involves a radical distanciation from what is ordinarily most
important to us.

He stood in the soft beams of sunshine diffused by the curtains, caught
for a moment in the stillness of the room, watching the dust swirling
slowly golden through patches of light that fell across the carpets and
furniture, feeling a strange closeness to the vanished woman. Being
here and touching her possessions in the dusty intimacy of these
rooms was like walking through her life, everything of her was here
but for the physical presence, and in some ways that was the least
important part of her for him.

Longing and aching are words that recur throughout Foxx’s work. ‘Blurred
Girl’ from Metamatic - its lovers ‘standing close, never quite touching’ -
would almost be the perfect Lacanian love song, in which the desired
object is always approached, never attained, and what is enjoyed is
suspension, deferral and circulation around the object, rather than
possession of it - ‘are we running still? or are we standing still?’ On Tiny
Colour Machines, as on Cathedral Oceans and the albums with Budd,
where there are no words, this feeling of enjoyable melancholy is
rendered by the minimally disturbed stillness and barely perturbed poise
of the sounds themselves.

I can detect tiny edges of time leaking through. I feel nothing is
completely separate. At some point everything leaks into everything
else. The trick is in finding the places. They are slowly moving.
Drifting. You can only do this accidentally. If you set out to do it
deliberately you will always fail.

It is only when you remember, only then will you realise that you
caught a glimpse. While you were talking to someone, or thinking of
something else. When your attention was diverted. Just a hint, a
glimmer, a shade.

Much later, you will remember. Without really knowing why.
Vague peripheral sensations gather. Some fraction of a long rhythm is
beginning to be recognised. The hidden frequencies and tides of the

city. Geometry of coincidence.

Listening to Tiny Colour Movies, as with all of Foxx’s best records, one
has a sense of returning to a dream-place. Foxx’s shifting or shadow city,
with its Ernst-like ‘green arcades’ and De Chirico colonnades, is urban
space as seen from the unconscious on a derive; an intensive space in
which elements of London, Rome, Florence and other, more secret places
are given an oneiric consistency.

I lost myself in that city more than 20 years ago.

Sleeping in cheap boarding houses. A ghost with leaves in his pocket
and no address. The good face half blind. A nebula of songs and
memories slipping in and out of focus. Someone told me he was there
but it didn’t register at the time. The voice came unfocussed from all
around. Still and quiet like the shadows of an ocean in the moving
trees.

Indented text from John Foxx’s ‘Quiet Man’ and ‘Shifting City’ texts and the
Cathedral Oceans booklet.

Electricity and Ghosts: Interview with John Foxx

k-punk post, September 23, 2006

MF: Which films were most influential on you early on?

JF: Oh, very cheap science fiction films mostly. There was one
particularly memorable movie called Robot Monster, so bad it was
surreal, it had the quality of a dream, an exceptional movie.

I now think it’s one of the best films I’ve ever seen, partly because it
had no regard for plot or anything else recognizable as conventional
cinema of the time. This of course made it an event of inestimable
importance to me, because, as a child I took it all literally - swallowed it
whole, like Alice’s potion.

And like that potion, it allowed entry to an unexpected universe. One
which had unfathomable logic and laws which were endlessly flexible. A
deeply exhilarating experience. I still dream sequences from it, or rather
I seem to have permanently incorporated sections of it into my dream
grammar.

Growing up with movies as a child and being subjected to them before
I could understand the adult preoccupations and motivations involved in
the plots, pitched me into conscripting these films as a personal
grammar. I had no choice, so I ended up with this Lynchian reservoir of
sequences that carried every dread and joy and everything in between.

These events are still imbued with unfathomable, inexplicable,
tantalizing mystery, because I couldn’t really understand them at all. It
was hallucinogenic and vivid, and provided me with an image bank and
a gorgeous range of emotional tones I still haven’t managed to exhaust.

Much later, when I got to ‘Cinema’ - or the official critical view of it -
the more intellectual, often French aspect. I didn’t recognise it at all.

Later, I ended up enjoying this sort of perspective a little, but in a
rather disengaged, sceptical way. To me, it seems a method of criticism
which is often marvelously baroque and can be engaging, but has little
to do with my own experience of Cinema.

I can only deal with it as a marvelous fictional construct, like medieval
religion or quantum physics - a consensual social hallucination
developed by a priesthood. In the end it’s as tangential as my own
individual one.

But that very crude, improvisational, amateurish side of cinema or
filmmaking, I continue to find deeply fascinating. Take for example Ed
Wood’s films. He made them simply because he was in a place where it
could be done.

I think of Ed Wood as a sort of advanced naive artist. He was among
the first to make cut-up movies. He achieved this by using props he came
across in warehouses and stock footage he discovered in the film vaults
of Hollywood cutting rooms, then he built movies around these
fragments.

This is the art of collage and sampling. It is art as found object, as
coincidence, as accident, as Surrealism, as Dada, as Situationism. All
made possible and motivated also by the dynamo of American
opportunism, but with great love and inadequacy and tenderness.

Ed Wood was doing, fifty years ago, what the avant garde are only
now beginning to do with film.

(This is also very similar to the way rock ‘n’ roll often manages to
parallel or prefigure avant garde concepts, by arriving at them from a
totally different direction. Pop is such a virile mongrel it’s capable of
effortlessly demonstrating, realising, manifesting, absorbing, remaking
any sort of academic intellectual concept. It can do this so well, it often
makes any parallel or previous version appear weak or even redundant).

An admiration for that sort of visceral, sensual, opportunistic, native
intelligence led to an interest in, and respect for, home video and super-
8 - very low grade domestic ways of making films - I suddenly realised
there was a whole other world there, one which hadn’t been properly
discussed, but as real, in fact more real and potentially at least as
powerful, as official cinema.

MF: The film collection you refer to in the sleeve notes to Tiny Colour
Movies - you write about it very beautifully. Are there any plans for
those films to be shown in the UK?

JF: Thanks. I’d like to - there are some problems with these fragments,

because they’re so small. They’re physically difficult things, and they’re
unique irreplaceable and very fragile, so you can only ever show digital
copies of them. But it would be interesting to do something like that. I’m
beginning to look at some possibilities now, working with Mike Barker,
who has accumulated a marvellous archive, and we’re discussing this
with some film festivals.

MF: I noticed you thanked Paul Auster in the sleeve notes, why was
that?

JF: Paul Auster has is very interesting to me, because I wrote this
thing called ‘The Quiet Man’ years ago, in the 80s, in fact I’m still
writing it. Then I read the New York Trilogy, and it struck so many
chimes. It was as if I’d written it, or it was the book I should have
written. I have to be very careful to find my way around it now.

Such occurrences are simultaneously rewarding and terrifying. They
illustrate the fact that there is something in the air, which is
tremendously heartening after working alone for years, yet they scare
you because it feels as if someone has published first, and therefore
registered their claim to where you discovered gold.

I simply wanted to acknowledge the effect, and the odd sort of
encouragement of recognised themes, as well as a continuing parallel
interest in the idea of lost movies and fragments MF: There’s a certain
kind of London affect that’s interesting, of stillness, and the city being
overgrown, which is sort of recurrent in your work - where’s that come
from do you think?

JF: When I first came to London it seemed a great deal like Lancashire,
where I’d come from. But Lancashire had fallen into ruin. The factories
had closed, the economy had faltered. We felt like the Incas after the
Spaniards had passed. Helpless, nostalgic savages adrift in the ruins.

I grew up playing in empty factories, huge places which were
overgrown. I remember trees growing out of the buildings. I remember a
certain moments of looking at it all and thinking what it would have
been like when it was all working. What life might be like, if it were all
working still.

All of my family worked in mills and factories and mines. And all this
was gently subsiding, spinning away.

Coming to London, I couldn’t help but wonder if it might also fall into
dissolution. Then I saw a picture a friend had. It was a realistic painting
of what appeared to be a view over a jungle from a high place.
Gradually you came to realise that it was a view of an overgrown city
from a tower, then you realised that this panorama was from a ruined
Centre Point and you could see Tottenham Court Road, Oxford Street,
Charing Cross road in the undergrowth. It felt like a revelation. It
manifested so perfectly this vision I’d had of everything becoming
overgrown, an overgrown London. A vision of longing and nostalgia
tinged with fear.

I would often experience a feeling of stillness and wonder as I walked
through certain parts of London. I often walked through empty buildings
and neglected, overlooked places and they would replay that sensation
very strongly.

I went to Shoreditch, in 1982, and made a studio there. When we first
went into the studio building it had trees growing out of the windows on
the upper stories. It was very like Lancashire, that whole area was
derelict, had been abandoned, because that had been the industrial bit of
the East End. Now there was no-one there, it was empty. It gave me that
calm drifting feeling of recognition.

There was some kind of collective image of overgrown and abandoned
cities at that time. Perhaps it’s always there. Such images were present
in Ballard, Burroughs, Philip K Dick. In those science fiction authors
writing about the near future - conducting thought experiments,
exploring likely consequences and views of the unrecognised present,
which I think is very valuable. They offer perspectives and meditations
on our vanity and endeavours. As such they maintain continuity with a
long line of imagery, from religious myths and folk stories to science
fiction.

MF: It seems to have a real unconscious resonance, this idea of
overgrown cities, it’s obviously there in surrealist paintings, which seem
to be a constant reference, especially in your early work -

JF: Yes, there’s that side of it too. In science fiction films you often get
those recurrent images, which I think are very beautiful, of someone
walking through an abandoned city.

We have accumulated a range of such images all along the line, from
folk and fairytales, to the actual construction of follies and romantic
overgrown gardens, to the truly dislocated, such as Piranesi’s ruins and
prisons, to Max Ernst’s paintings, or Breughel’s Tower of Babel, or the
background urban locations in Bosch, as well as De Chirico’s townscapes
and shadows.

Planet of the Apes has one of the most shocking and resonant - the end
of original movie, where we see the Statue of Liberty tilted in the sand.
A real jolt, the first time you see it. A modern take on Shelley’s
Ozymandias.

The radiance I sometimes refer to occupies this sort of area. I often see
people as if in a frozen moment and they seem to have an internal glow
inside them. Their skin seems translucent and they carry their own time.
I feel calm and distant and warm from this. It can happen in an instant.
In very mundane urban situations. You realise you are not looking at a
single person, but at a sort of stream or cascade.

It happened yesterday in a supermarket. I happened to glance at a
young woman who looked like a transfigured hidden Madonna. She
wore jeans and a teeshirt, an ordinary woman. But equally, she was a
continuity, a lovely genetic physical thread to other times, both previous
and ahead and still unformed. She simply glowed. Quietly and
unknowingly luminous. The Eternal Woman.

MF: The sort of feelings you deal with are more abstract; it’s like you go
to those states without reference to the way they’ve traditionally been
coded, really. You often use the word ‘angelic’, or ‘angel’...

JF: Yes, very perilous territory, especially since these terms have since
been co-opted by New Agers. I’ll put on the grey suit to dispel all that.

Many of these spring from what I think of as ‘thought exper-iments’ -
things I employ all the time, as a tool to get at half buried or emerging
realisations. If you’re at all interested, I’ll try to outline a few.

Firstly, the idea interested me - still does - of parallel evolutions -
imagine something that may have evolved alongside us, something we’re
not quite aware of yet, that we haven’t yet discovered.

That may include things which exist in other planes or by other
means, or things which resemble human beings so well that we assume

them to be human, but they may not be. Yet they live among us
undetected - the possibility that other forms of life may have evolved
alongside us, but invisible because of their proximity.

‘Hiding in plain sight’ is a great idea, something that’s very interesting
in itself - on one level connected with sleight of hand and parlour tricks
and conmen, but on the other hand, very subtle, intuition led
perceptions. It could give rise to situations that are tremendously
moving, fragile, tender. Metaphorically very resonant.

Another one - I’m also very interested in the concept of a singularity.
An event that only happens once, or once every thousand or million
years.

There may be rhythms which extend over tens of millions of years and
are therefore unrecognisable to us, except as single unconnectable and
unexplainable events.

But the fact that we have no context to fit them into doesn’t mean
they don’t happen.

Yet another thought experiments posits the concept of Angels as a
connection between things. An entity that only exists between. A sort of
web or connection. They arise purely as an intrinsic, invisible and
unsuspected component of the evolution of the ecology that supports
whatever they exist between. They cannot exist on their own.

Many of us have these little incidents - everything from coincidences
onward - things that we can’t explain using the references we commonly
employ.

I’m very interested in those things, always have been. Through those
odd things, we glimpse something that’s outside the way we usually look
at the world, and realise there might be another way of looking at it, an
alternate perception to the one we have, and I think that’s a very
valuable possibility to keep hold of. The awareness that maybe there are
gaps in our perception that we aren’t able to fill yet.

MF: Yes, because I think one of the most powerful things - which
comes out in Tiny Colour Movies but in retrospect has always been there
- is that you’re able to deal with positive, affirmatory feelings that are
eerie and uncanny, and possess a certain kind of calm serenity.

JF: Good, somehow that’s always been a vital component of that sort
of experience, for me. A sensation of utter calm and stillness. Miles away
from any agitation. It seems deeply positive.

It’s an opposite to the excitement you get from, say, rock and roll...I
think in general we like to stir ourselves up in various ways, using art or
using media or whatever, and I think it’s just as valid to move against
the norm, and the norm at the moment is to speed everything up.

I mean, that’s what we’re trying to attain, aren’t we, through media? -
That awful maximisation of time and efficient transmission of
‘information’. Some of this is economic - time equals money - and some
is simply done because it can be done, and has become an unquestioned
convention.

If you could time-jump to show the average TV ad of today to
someone 20 or 30 years ago, they wouldn’t understand it. The ad would
depend on the viewer’s perception speed and also on a series of recent
references. Our parents simply weren’t fast enough, they hadn’t been
accelerated as we have been by media and the pace of modern life, and
they also don’t have the inculcated, busy reference chain.

Acceleration is also kind of exciting and interesting, I mean I really
enjoy it, sometimes - but it equally leads you to think ‘what happens if
you do the opposite?’-it might be just as pleasurable and just as valid to
do that.

So, one of the things I want to try to do is work on the other end of
this spectrum - see what happens when you slow things down.

I was surprised when I was doing the first music for Cathedral Oceans,
using echoes that were 30 seconds long, so the rhythms were 30 seconds
between the beats.

It was very interesting slowing down enough to work with that
intuitively. You had to do it, you had to synchronise with the track in
order to be able to work with it. And it’s very interesting what kind of
state you get into - intense, yet calm and tranquil. A sort of trance state.

MF: I think it’s particularly on the LPs with Harold Budd, where you
get that sort of aching plateau, where you slow down so much that any
peturbation has a massive effect really.

Harold was one of the first people who got that right, I think. One of
the very first to have sufficient courage to leave enough space in the
music and not fill spaces unnecessarily. Not decorate. Takes an awful lot
of quiet courage to do that.

When this is done, it allows an alternative ecology to emerge - one
based on events that are much less frequent. And that, of course, affects

their significance. You are drawn to them in a sort of smiling fascination,
rather than the usual pop music method of lapel grabbing bombardment.

MF: It seems to be something similar to what you get in Tarkovsky
films - where either people say ‘oh, this is too slow I can’t stand it’, or
they enter into the slow time of the film and anything that happens
almost becomes too much.

JF: Exactly, you can concentrate on any event very thoroughly, when
that mode of perception is made available. Events become stately and
welcome and valued and significant, and their arrival and departure can
be fully experienced. The lack of jostling allows that sort of elegant
notional space to open up.

It functions at the other end of the spectrum from commercial TV and
cinema, and of rock & roll. Both ends can be equally interesting, I think.

MF: It seems to me that you’ve always imposed the stillness and
calmness of painting and photography or a certain type of film onto the
agitation of rock, really. Certain kind of dreams - the dreams we’re most
familiar with - are hyper-agitated, full of urgency etc, but there’s
another type of dream quality you seem to get to where those urgencies
are suspended and you’re out of that everyday life push-and-pull, really.
I wondered - there seems to be a certain aching, or longing quality -
these are words you seem to use a lot in your music...

JF: Well, dreams are a very important component. I realised that it is
not simply the image you present yourself with, in a dream, which is
important - it’s also the emotional tone of the scene. You can see a
cloud, but this will be accompanied by a sense of wonder or by a sense
of dread, and it is that accompaniment which determines its meaning.

The employment of these images and tones are some of the things that
everyone shares, aren’t they? They’re composed of bits of unique
personal events and references and memories, such as longings that you
might have had when you’re a child.

When your parents are away even for an hour it feel as though it goes
on forever and you really deeply miss them - and the abstraction, the
tone component of that just carries on through life. Gets applied to
different situations. These longings - and all other emotional parts of the
spectrum - join the repertoire of tones we carry and apply. Some
moments last forever.

MF: But there’s almost a positive side, almost an enjoyment of longing

and ache.

JF: Oh yes, where the observer part of you acknowledges an emotional
connection with the rest. Simultaneously you feel as though you are very
integrated, yet you are being gently pulled away from yourself. Gently
disengaged.

MF: Isn’t the ‘emotionless’ quality of your music more to do with a
certain kind of calm?

JF: Yes, it’s quite a complex thing, a compound. There are states
where there’s a sensation of time passing, things changing, knowing the
world is changing, falling in on itself, and reforming. And you may even
be in the process of doing just that yourself.

But there are moments where you just stand by and watch it all,
where you’re aware of it, in a moment that seems to go on forever. So
it’s something of standing in a still place and watching the patterns in
passing crowds and even in your own life. It can be a very powerful
experience.

That stillness, and the maintenance of a quiet dignity in the face of
insurmountable circumstances can be immensely moving to witness.

It can be much more effective and moving if someone tells the story in
an unemotional or undramatic way. You find that in Ishiguro. Remains of
the Day or Never Let Me Go are good examples of that kind of writing,
where the most important components remain unstated. The Leopard is
suffused with, and is dependent on a variant of this.

It’s also allied to a device used in different ways by Charlie Chaplin,
Buster Keaton and Cary Grant. - An archetypical figure attempts to
retain dignity in the face of the worldly chaos while remaining ever
hopeful of romance.

And with Ballard and Burroughs, you get an almost gentlemanly,
middle class version of a similar sort of stance - mayhem of all kinds
observed from a disengaged viewpoint.

Another Grey World: Darkstar,
James Blake, Kanye West, Drake and
‘Party Hauntology’

‘It’s a really grey-sounding synth, really organic and grainy. We call
them “swells” - where synthesisers start quite minimal and then develop
into a huge chord, before progressing. I felt like it wouldn’t be right if
we just carried on with that dayglo Hyperdub sound of a couple of years
ago. I mean I love those songs, but it already feels like a lifetime away.’ I
felt vindicated when I read these remarks of Darkstar’s James Young in
an interview with Dan Hancox. When I first heard the album about
which Young is talking - 2010’s North - the phrase that came to my
mind was ‘Another Grey World’. The landscape of North felt like the
verdant Max Ernst forest of Eno’s Another Green World become ash.

. ..with winter ahead of us

The depressive’s world is black and/ or white, (you only have to
remember the covers of Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures and Closer),
but North does not (yet) project a cold world entirely swathed in snow.
North is the direction that the album is heading towards, not a
destination it has reached. Its landscape is colourless rather than black,
its mood tentative - it is grey as in unresolved, a grey area. This is an
album defined by its negative capability of remaining in doubts, disquiet
and dissatisfactions that it unable to name. It is grey as in The Cure’s ‘All
Cats Are Grey’ from Faith, a record that stood between the spidery
psychedelia of Seventeen Seconds and the unrelieved darkness of
Pornography. Yet North is ultimately too jittery to muster the glacial
fatalism of Faith but what North has in common with The Cure’s great
records is the sense of total immersion in a mood. It is a work that came
out of method immersion: Young told Dan Hancox that, as they recorded
North, the group had listened obsessively to Radiohead, Burial, the

Human League and the first album by Orchestral Manouevres in the
Dark. The record demands the same kind of involvement, which is
perhaps why some found it unengaging. On a casual listen, the very
unresolved quality of the tracks could seem simply undercooked. James
Buttery’s vocals could come off as limp, anaemic. In addition, many were
disappointed by Darkstar’s failure to provide an album full of the
‘robotic 2-step’ that they had invented on ‘Aidy’s Girl is a Computer’. In
fact, they made the robotic 2-step album but ditched it, dissatisfied with
its lack of ambition. (This wholly completed album that was never
released is one of several parallels with Burial.) ‘Aidy’s Girl is a
Computer’ apart, if you heard North without knowing the history, you
wouldn’t assume any connection with dubstep. At the same time, North
isn’t straightforwardly a return to a pre-dance sound. It is more a
continuation of a certain mode of electronic pop that was prematurely
terminated sometime in the mid-80s: like New Order if they hadn’t
abandoned the sleek cybernetic mausoleum that Martin Hannett built for
them on Movement.

Except, of course, that it is not possible to simply continue that
trajectory as if nothing had happened. Darkstar acknowledge the present
only negatively. It impinges on their music in perhaps the only way it
can, as a failure of the future, as a temporal disorder that has infected
the voice, causing it to stutter and sibilate, to fragment into strange
slithering shards. Part of what separates Darkstar from their synthpop
forebears is the fact that the synthesiser no longer connotes futurity. But
Darkstar are not retreating from a vivid sense of futurity - because there
is no such futurity from which they could retreat. This becomes clear
when you compare the Darkstar cover of ‘Gold’ to the Human League
original. It’s not just that one is no more futuristic than the other; it’s
that neither are futuristic. The Human League track is clearly a
superseded futurism, while the Darkstar track seems to come after the
future.

It’s this sense of living in an interregnum, that makes North so
(un)timely. Where Burial made contact with the secret sadness
underlying the boom, Darkstar articulate the sense of foreboding that is
everywhere after the economic crash of 2008. North is certainly full of
references to lost companionship: the album can be read as an oblique
take on a love affair gone wrong.

Our fate’s not to share....

The connection between us gone....

But the very focus on the love couple rather than the rave massive is
itself symptomatic of a turn inward. In a discussion that Simon Reynolds
and I had about North shortly after it was released, Reynolds argued that
it was a mistake to talk as if rave was bereft of emotion. Rave was a
music saturated with affect, but the affect involved wasn’t associated
with romance or introspection The introspective turn in 21st century
(post)dance music was therefore not a turn towards emotion, it was a
shift from collectively experienced affect to privatised emotions. There
was an intrinsic and inevitable sadness to this inward turn, regardless of
whether the music was officially sad or not. The twinning of romance
and introspection, love and its disappointments, runs through 20th
century pop. By contrast, dance music since disco offered up another
kind of emotional palette, based in a different model of escape from the
miseries of individual selfhood.

The 21st century has often felt like the comedown after a speed binge,
or the exile back into privatised selfhood, and the songs on North have
the jittery clarity of Prozac withdrawal.

It’s significant that most of the digital interference on North is applied
to James Buttery’s voice. Much of the vocal sounds as if it has been
recorded on a shaky mobile phone connection. I’m reminded of Franco
Berardi’s arguments about the relationship between informational
overload and depression. Berardi’s argument is not that the dot.com
crash caused depression, but the reverse: the crash was caused by the
excessive strain put on people’s nervous systems by new informational
technologies. Now, more than a decade after the dot.com crash and the
density of data has massively increased. The paradigmatic labourer is
now the call centre worker - the banal cyborg, punished whenever they
unplug from the communicative matrix. On North, James Buttery,
afflicted by all manner of digital palsies, sounds like a cyborg whose
implants and interfaces have come loose, learning to be a man again,
and not liking it very much.

North is like Kanye West’s 2008 album 808s and Heartbreak with all

the gloss removed. There is the same method melancholia, the same
anchoring in early 80s synthpop, explicitly flagged in 808’s case by the
cover design’s echo of Peter Saville’s sleeves for New Order’s Blue
Monday and Power ; Corruption and Lies. The opening track ‘Say You Will’
sounds like it has been worked up out of the crisp synthetic chill of Joy
Division’s ‘Atmosphere’ and the funereal drum tattoo of New Order’s ‘In
A Lonely Place’. As with North, though, the 80s parallels are disrupted by
the digital effects used on the voice. 808s and Heartbreak pioneered the
use of Auto-Tune, which would subsequently come to dominate R&B
and hip-hop from the late 00s onwards. In a sense, the conspicuous use
of Auto-Tune - that is to say, its use as an effect, as opposed to its
official purpose as a device to correct a singer’s pitch - was a 90s
throwback, since this was popularised by Cher on her 1998 single
‘Believe’. Auto-Tune is in many ways the sonic equivalent of digital
airbrushing, and the (over) use of the two technologies (alongside the
increasing prevalence of cosmetic surgery) result in a look and feel that
is hyperbolically enhanced rather than conspicuously artificial. If
anything is the signature of 21st century consumer culture, is this feeling
of a digitally upgraded normality - a perverse yet ultra-banal normality,
from which all flaws have been erased.

On 808s and Heartbreak, we hear the sobs in the heart of the 21st
century pleasuredome. Kanye’s lachrymose android shtick reaches its
maudlin depths on the astonishing ‘Pinocchio Story’. This is the kind of
Auto-Tuned lament you might expect neo-Pinocchio and android-
Oedipus David from Spielberg’s AI (2001) to sing; a little like Britney
Spears’s ‘Piece Of Me’, you can either hear this as the moment when a
commodity achieves selfconsciousness, or when a human realises he or
she has become a commodity. It’s the soured sound at the end of the
rainbow, an electro as desolated as Suicide’s infernal synth-opera
‘Frankie Teardrop’.

A secret sadness lurks behind the 21st century’s forced smile. This
sadness concerns hedonism itself, and it’s no surprise that it is in hip-hop
- a genre that has become increasingly aligned with consumerist
pleasure over the past 20-odd years - that this melancholy has registered
most deeply. Drake and Kanye West are both morbidly fixated on
exploring the miserable hollowness at the core of super-affluent
hedonism. No longer motivated by hip-hop’s drive to conspicuously

consume - they long ago acquired anything they could have wanted -
Drake and West instead dissolutely cycle through easily available
pleasures, feeling a combination of frustration, anger, and self-disgust,
aware that something is missing, but unsure exactly what it is. This
hedonist’s sadness - a sadness as widespread as it is disavowed - was
nowhere better captured than in the doleful way that Drake sings, ‘we
threw a party/ yeah, we threw a party,’ on Take Care’s ‘Marvin’s Room’.

It’s no surprise to learn that Kanye West is an admirer of James Blake.
There’s an affective as well as sonic affinity between parts of Kanye’s
808s and Heartbreak and My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy and Blake’s
two albums. You might say that Blake’s whole MO is a partial re¬
naturalisation of the digitally manipulated melancholy Kanye auditioned
on 808s: soul music after the Auto-Tune cyborg. But liberated from the
penthouse-prison of West’s ego, unsure of itself, caught up in all kinds of
impasses, the disaffection languishes listlessly, not always even capable
of recognizing itself as sadness.

You might go so far as to say that the introspective turn reached a
kind of conclusion with Blake’s 2013 album Overgrown. In his
transformation from dubstep to pop, Blake had gone from digitally
manipulating his own voice to becoming a singer; from constructing
tracks to writing songs. The initial motivation for Blake’s approach to
the song no doubt came from Burial, whose combination of jittery 2-step
beats and R&B vocal samples pointed the way to a possible vision of 21st
century pop. It was as if Burial had produced the dub versions; now the
task was to construct the originals, and that entailed replacing the
samples with an actual vocalist.

Listening back to Blake’s records in chronological sequence is like
hearing a ghost gradually assume material form; or it’s like hearing the
song form (re)coalescing out of digital ether. A track such as ‘I Only
Know (What I Know Now)’ from the Klavierwerke EP is gorgeously
insubstantial - it’s the merest ache, Blake’s voice a series of sighs and
unintelligible pitch-shifted hooks, the production mottled and
waterlogged, the arrangement intricate and fragile, conspicuously
inorganic in the way that it makes no attempt to smooth out the
elements of the montage. The voice is a smattering of traces and tics, a
spectral special effect scattered across the mix. But with Blake’s self-
titled debut album, something like traditional sonic priorities were

restored. The reinvention of pop that his early releases promised was
now seemingly given up, as Blake’s de-fragmented voice moved to the
front of the mix, and implied or partially disassembled songs became
‘proper’ songs, complete with un-deconstructed piano and organ.
Electronics and some vocal manipulation remained, but they were now
assigned a decorative function. Blake’s blue-eyed soul vocals, and the
way that his tracks combined organ (or organ-like sounds) with
electronica, made him reminiscent of a half-speed Steve Winwood.

Just as with Darkstar’s North, Blake’s turn to songs met with a mixed
response. Many who were enthusiastic about the early EPs were
disappointed or mildly dismayed by James Blake. Veiling and implying
an object is the surest route to producing the impression of sublimity.
Removing the veils and bringing that object to the fore risks de¬
sublimation, and some found Blake’s actual songs unequal to the virtual
ones his early records had induced them into hallucinating. Blake’s voice
was as cloyingly overpowering as it was non-specific in its feeling. The
result was a quavering, tremulous vagueness, which was by no means
clarified by lyrics that were similarly allusive/elusive. The album came
over as if it were earnestly entreating us to feel, without really telling us
what is was we were supposed to be feeling. Perhaps it’s this emotional
obliqueness that contributes to what Angus Finlayson, in his review of
Overgrown for FACT, characterised as the strangeness of the songs on
James Blake. They seemed, Finlayson said, like ‘half-songs, skeletal place-
markers for some fuller arrangement yet to come.’ The journey into
‘proper’ songs was not as complete as it first appeared. It was like Blake
had tried to reconstruct the song form with only dub versions or dance
mixes as his guide. The result was something scrambled, garbled,
solipsistic, a bleary version of the song form that was as frustrating as it
was fascinating. The delicate insubstantiality of the early EPs had given
way to something that felt overfull. It was like drowning in a warm bath
(perhaps with your wrists cut).

On Blake’s albums, there is a simultaneous feeling that the tracks are
both congested and unfinished, and that incompleteness - the sketchy
melodies, the half-hooks, the repeated lines that play like clues to some
emotional event never disclosed in the songs themselves - may be why
they eventually get under your skin. The oddly indeterminate -
irresolute and unresolved - character of Blake’s music gives it the quality

of gospel music for those who have lost their faith so completely that
they have forgotten they ever had it. What survives is only a quavering
longing, without object or context, Blake coming off like an amnesiac
holding on to images from a life and a narrative that he cannot recover.
This negative capability means that Overgrown is like an inversion of the
oversaturated high-gloss emotional stridency of chart and reality TV pop,
which is always perfectly certain of what it is feeling.

Yet there’s an unconvincing - or perhaps unconvinced - quality to so
much of mainstream culture’s hedonism now. Oddly, this is most evident
in the annexing of R&B by club music. When former R&B producers and
performers embraced dance music, you might have expected an increase
in euphoria, an influx of ecstasy. But the reverse has happened, and it’s
as if many of the dancefloor tracks are pulled down by a hidden gravity,
a disowned sadness. The digitally-enhanced uplift in the records by
producers such as Flo-Rida, Pitbull and will.i.am is like a poorly
photoshopped image or a drug that we’ve hammered so much we’ve
become immune to its effects. It’s hard not to hear these records’
demands that we enjoy ourselves as thin attempts to distract from a
depression that they can only mask, never dissipate.

In a brilliant essay on The Quietus website, Dan Barrow analysed the
tendency in a slew of chartpop over the past few years - including Jay-Z
and Alicia Keys’s ‘Empire State of Mind’ Kesha’s ‘Tik Tok’, Flo Rida’s
‘Club Can’t Even Handle Me Yet’ - ‘to give the listener the pay-off, the
sonic money-shot, as soon and as obviously as possible’. Pop has always
delivered sugar-sweet pleasure, of course, but, Barrow argues, there’s a
tyrannical desperation about this new steroid-driven pop. It doesn’t
seduce; it tyrannises. This, Barrow argues, is ‘a crude, overdetermined
excess, as if pop were forcing itself back to its defining characteristics -
chorus hooks, melody, “accessibility” - and blowing them up to
cartoonish size.’ There’s an analogy to be drawn between this artificially
inflated pop and Berardi’s discussion of internet pornography and drugs
such as Viagra, which, similarly, dispense with seduction and aim
directly at pleasure. According to Berardi, remember, we are so
overwhelmed by the incessant demands of digital communications, we
are simply too busy to engage in arts of enjoyment - highs have to come
in a no-fuss, hyperbolic form so that we can quickly return to checking
email or updates on social networking sites. Berardi’s remarks can give

us an angle on the pressures that dance music has been subject to over
the last decade. Whereas the digital technology of the 80s and 90s fed
the collective experience of the dancefloor, the communicative
technology of the 21st century has undermined it, with even clubbers
obsessively checking their smartphones. (Beyonce and Lady Gaga’s
‘Telephone’ - which sees the pair begging a caller to stop bugging them
so they can dance - now seems like a last failed attempt to keep the
dancefloor free of communicational intrusion.)

Even the most apparently uncomplicated calls to enjoyment can’t fully
suppress a certain sadness. Take Katy Perry’s ‘Last Friday Night’. On the
face of it, the track is a simple celebration of pleasure (‘Last Friday
night/ Yeah we maxed our credit cards/ And got kicked out of the bar’).
Yet it’s not hard to hear something Sisyphean, something purgatorial, in
the song’s evocation of a (not so) merry-go-round of pleasure that Perry
and her friends can never get off: ‘Always say we’re gonna stop/ This
Friday night/ Do it all again...’ Played at half-speed, this would sound as
bleak as early Swans. David Guetta’s ‘Play Hard’ calls up a similarly
interminable repetition. Pleasure becomes an obligation that will never
let up - ‘us hustler’s work is never through/ We work hard, play hard’ -
and hedonism is explicitly paralleled with work: ‘Keep partyin’ like it’s
your job’. It’s the perfect anthem for an era in which the boundaries
between work and non-work are eroded - by the requirement that we
are always-on (that, for instance, we will answer emails at any hour of
the day), and that we never lose an opportunity to marketise our own
subjectivity. In a (not at all trivial) sense, partying is now a job. Images
of hedonistic excess provide much of the content on Facebook, uploaded
by users who are effectively unpaid workers, creating value for the site
without being remunerated for it. Partying is a job in another sense - in
conditions of objective immiseration and economic downturn, making
up the affective deficit is outsourced to us.

Sometimes, a free-floating sadness seeps into the grain of the music
itself. On their blog No Good Advice, the blogger J describes the use of a
sample from Kaoma’s 1989 track ‘Lambada’ on Jennifer Lopez’s 2011 hit
‘On The Floor’: ‘The snatch of ‘Lambada’ functions as a buried-memory
trigger, a sort of party hauntology that lends the song a slight edge of
wistful, nostalgic sadness.’ There is no reference to sadness in the official
text of the track, which is a simple exhortation to dance. So it’s as if the

sorrow comes from outside, like traces of the waking world incorporated
into a dream, or like the grief which creeps into all the embedded worlds
in Inception (2010).

‘Party hauntology’ might even be the best name for the dominant 21st
century form of pop, the transnational club music produced by Guetta,
Flo-Rida, Calvin Harris and will.i.am. But the debts to the past, the
failure of the future are repressed here, meaning that the hauntology
takes a disavowed form. Take a track like the Black Eyed Peas’
immensely popular ‘I Gotta Feeling’. Although ‘I Gotta Feeling’ is
ostensibly an optimistic record, there’s something forlorn about it.
Perhaps that’s because of will.i.am’s use of Auto-Tune - there seems to
be Sparky’s Magic Piano-like machinic melancholy intrinsic to the
technology itself, something which Kanye drew out rather than invented
on 808s and Heartbreak. In spite of the track’s declamatory repetitions,
there’s a fragile, fugitive quality about the pleasures ‘I Gotta Feeling’ so
confidently expects. That’s partly because ‘I Gotta Feeling’ comes off
more like a memory of a past pleasure than an anticipation of a pleasure
that is yet to be felt. The album from which the track comes, The E.N.D.
(The Energy Never Dies) was - like its predecessor, The Beginning - so
immersed in Rave that it effectively operated as an act of homage to the
genre. The Beginning’s ‘Time (Dirty Bit)’ could have actually passed for a
Rave track from the early 90s - the crudeness of its cut and paste
montage recalls the ruff ‘n’ ready textures that samplers would construct
at that time, and its borrowing from Dirty Dancing’s ‘(I’ve Had) The Time
of my Life’ was just the kind of subversion/sublimation of cheesy source
material that Rave producers delighted in. Yet, the Black Eyed Peas’
Rave-appropri-ations didn’t function so much as revivals of Rave as
denials that the genre had ever happened in the first place. If Rave
hasn’t yet happened, then there is no need to mourn it. We can act as if
we’re experiencing all this for the first time, that the future is still ahead
of us. The sadness ceases to be something we feel, and instead consists in
our temporal predicament itself, and we are like Jack in the Gold Room
of the Overlook Hotel, dancing to ghost songs, convincing ourselves that
the music of yesteryear is really the music of today.

‘Always Yearning For The Time That Just
Eluded Us’ - Introduction to Laura Oldfield
Ford’s Savage Messiah (Verso, 2011)

June 2011

‘I regard my work as diaristic; the city can be read as a palimpsest, of
layers of erasure and overwriting,’ Laura Oldfield Ford has said. ‘The
need to document the transient and ephemeral nature of the city is
becoming increasingly urgent as the process of enclosure and
privatisation continues apace.’ The city in question is of course London,
and Ford’s Savage Messiah offers a samizdat counter-history of the capital
during the period of neoliberal domination. If Savage Messiah is
‘diaristic’, it is also much more than a memoir. The stories of Ford’s own
life necessarily bleed into the stories of others, and it is impossible to see
the joins. ‘This decaying fabric, this unknowable terrain has become my
biography, the euphoria then the anguish, layers of memories colliding,
splintering and reconfiguring.’ The perspective Ford adopts, the voices
she speaks in - and which speak through her - are those of the officially
defeated: the punks, squatters, ravers, football hooligans and militants
left behind by a history which has ruthlessly photoshopped them out of
its finance-friendly SimCity. Savage Messiah uncovers another city, a city
in the process of being buried, and takes us on a tour of its landmarks:
The Isle of Dogs...The Elephant...Westway...Lea Bridge...North Acton...
Canary Wharf...Dalston...Kings Cross...Hackney Wick...

In one of many echoes of punk culture, Ford calls Savage Messiah a
‘zine’. She began producing it in 2005, eight years into a New Labour
government that had consolidated rather than overturned Thatcherism.
The context is bleak. London is a conquered city; it belongs to the
enemy. ‘The translucent edifices of Starbucks and Costa Coffee line these
shimmering promenades, ‘young professionals’ sit outside gently
conversing in sympathetic tones.’ The dominant mood is one of

restoration and reaction, but it calls itself modernisation, and it calls its
divisive and exclusionary work - making London safe for the super-rich
- regeneration. The struggle over space is also a struggle over time and
who controls it. Resist neoliberal modernisation and (so we are told) you
consign yourself to the past. Savage Messiah’s London is overshadowed
by the looming megalith of ‘London 2012’, which over the course of the
last decade has subsumed more and more of the city into its banal
science fiction telos, as the Olympic Delivery Authority transformed
whole areas of East London into a temporary photo opportunity for
global capitalism. Where once there were ‘fridge mountains and
abandoned factories’ out of Tarkovsky and Ballard, a semi-wilderness in
the heart of the city, now a much blander desert grows: spaces for
wandering are eliminated, making way for shopping malls and soon-to-
be-abandoned Olympic stadia. ‘When I was writing the zines,’ Ford
remembers, ‘I was drifting through a London haunted by traces and
remnants of rave, anarcho-punk scenes and hybrid subcultures at a time
when all these incongruous urban regeneration schemes were
happening. The idea that I was moving through a spectral city was really
strong, it was as if everything prosaic and dull about the New Labour
version of the city was being resisted by these ghosts of brutalist
architecture, of ‘90s convoy culture, rave scenes, ‘80s political
movements and a virulent black economy of scavengers, peddlers and
shoplifters. I think the book could be seen in the context of the aftermath
of an era, where residues and traces of euphoric moments haunt a
melancholy landscape.’

All of these traces are to be eliminated from the Restoration London
that will be celebrated at London 2012. With their lovingly reproduced
junk-strata, overgrowing vegetation and derelict spaces, Savage Messiah’s
images offer a direct riposte to the slick digital images which the
Olympic Delivery Authority has pasted up in the now heavily policed,
restricted and surveilled Lee valley. Blair’s Cool Britannia provides the
template for an anodyne vision of London designed by the ‘creative
indus-tries’. Everything comes back as an advertising campaign. It isn’t
just that the alternatives are written over, or out, it is that they return as
their own simulacra. A familiar story. Take the Westway, West London’s
formerly deplored dual carriageway, once a cursed space to be
mythologised by Ballard, punks and Chris Petit, now just another edgy

film set:

This liminal territory, cast in a negative light in the 70s was
recuperated by MTV and boring media types in the 90s. The Westway
became the backdrop for Gorillaz imbecility, bland drum & bass
record sleeves and photo shoots in corporate skate parks.

Cool Britannia. Old joke.

‘Space’ becomes the over arching commodity. Notting Hill. New Age
cranks peddling expensive junk. Homeopathy and boutiques, angel
cards and crystal healing.

Media and high finance on the one hand, faux-mysticism and
superstition on the other: all the strategies of the hopeless and those who
exploit them in Restoration London...Space is indeed the commodity
here. A trend that started 30 years ago, and intensified as council
housing was sold off and not replaced, culminated in the insane super¬
inflation of property prices in the first years of the 21st century. If you
want a simple explanation for the growth in cultural conservatism, for
London’s seizure by the forces of Restoration, you need look no further
than this. As Jon Savage points out in England’s Dreaming, the London of
punk was still a bombed-out city, full of chasms, caverns, spaces that
could be temporarily occupied and squatted. Once those spaces are
enclosed, practically all of the city’s energy is put into paying the
mortgage or the rent. There’s no time to experiment, to journey without
already knowing where you will end up. Your aims and objectives have
to be stated up front. ‘Free time’ becomes convalescence. You turn to
what reassures you, what will most refresh you for the working day: the
old familiar tunes (or what sound like them). London becomes a city of
pinched-face drones plugged into iPods.

Savage Messiah rediscovers the city as a site for drift and daydreams, a
labyrinth of side streets and spaces resistant to the process of
gentrification and ‘development’ set to culminate in the miserable hyper¬
spectacle of 2012. The struggle here is not only over the (historical)
direction of time but over different uses of time. Capital demands that
we always look busy, even if there’s no work to do. If neoliberalism’s

magical voluntarism is to be believed, there are always opportunities to
be chased or created; any time not spent hustling and hassling is time
wasted. The whole city is forced into a gigantic simulation of activity, a
fantacism of productivism in which nothing much is actually produced,
an economy made out of hot air and bland delirium. Savage Messiah is
about another kind of delirium: the releasing of the pressure to be
yourself, the slow unravelling of biopolitical identity, a depersonalised
journey out to the erotic city that exists alongside the business city. The
eroticism here is not primarily to do with sexuality, although it
sometimes includes it: it is an art of collective enjoyment, in which a
world beyond work can - however briefly - be glimpsed and grasped.
Fugitive time, lost afternoons, conversations that dilate and drift like
smoke, walks that have no particular direction and go on for hours, free
parties in old industrial spaces, still reverberating days later. The
movement between anonymity and encounter can be very quick in the
city. Suddenly, you are off the street and into someone’s life-space.
Sometimes, it’s easier to talk to people you don’t know. There are
fleeting intimacies before we melt back into the crowd, but the city has
its own systems of recall: a block of flats or a street you haven’t focused
on for a long time will remind you of people you met only once, years
ago. Will you ever see them again?

I got invited up for a cup of tea in one of those Tecton flats on the
Harrow road, one of the old men from the day centre I work in. I took
him up Kilburn High Road shopping and watered the fuchsias on his
balcony. We talked about the Blitz and hospitals mostly. He used to be
a scientist and wrote shopping lists on brown envelopes dated and
filed in a stack of biscuit tins.

I miss him.

I miss them all.

Savage Messiah deploys anachronism as a weapon. At first sight, at first
touch - and tactility is crucial to the experience: the zine doesn’t feel the
same when it’s JPEGed on screen - Savage Messiah seems like something

familiar. The form itself, the mix of photographs, typeface-text and
drawings, the use of scissors and glue rather than digital cut and paste;
all of this make Savage Messiah seem out of time, which is not to say out
of date. There were deliberate echoes of the para-art found on punk and
postpunk record sleeves and fanzines from the 1970s and 1980s. Most
insistently, I’m reminded of Gee Vaucher, who produced the
paradoxically photorealistically delirious record covers and posters for
anarcho-punk collective Crass. ‘I think with the look of the zine I was
trying to restore radical politics to an aesthetic that had been rendered
anodyne by advertising campaigns, Shoreditch club nights etc.,’ Ford
says. ‘That anarcho-punk look was everywhere but totally emptied of its
radical critique. It seemed important to go back to that moment of the
late ‘70s and early ‘80s to a point where there was social upheaval,
where there were riots and strikes, exciting cultural scenes and ruptures
in the fabric of everyday life.’ The ‘return’ to the postpunk moment is the
route to an alternative present. Yet this is a return only to a certain
ensemble of styles and methods - nothing quite like Savage Messiah
actually existed back then.

Savage Messiah is a gigantic, unfinished collage, which - like the city -
is constantly reconfiguring itself. Macro-and micro-narratives proliferate
tuberously; spidery slogans recur; figures migrate through various
versions of London, sometimes trapped inside the drearily glossy spaces
imagined by advertising and regeneration propaganda, sometimes free to
drift. She deploys collage in much the same way William Burroughs used
it: as a weapon in time-war. The cut-up can dislocate established
narratives, break habits, allow new associations to coalesce. In Savage
Messiah, the seamless, already-established capitalist reality of London
dissolves into a riot of potentials.

Savage Messiah is written for those who could not be regenerated, even
if they wanted to be. They are the unregenerated, a lost generation,
‘always yearning for the time that just eluded us’: those who were born
too late for punk but whose expectations were raised by its incendiary
afterglow; those who watched the Miners’ Strike with partisan
adolescent eyes but who were too young to really participate in the
militancy; those who experienced the future-rush euphoria of rave as
their birthright, never dreaming that it could burn out like fried
synapses; those, in short, who simply did not find the ‘reality’ imposed

by the conquering forces of neoliberalism liveable. It’s adapt or die, and
there are many different forms of death available to those who can’t pick
up the business buzz or muster the requisite enthusiasm for the creative
industries. Six million ways to die, choose one: drugs, depression,
destitution. So many forms of catatonic collapse. In earlier times,
‘deviants, psychotics and the mentally collapsed’ inspired militant-poets,
situationists, Rave-dreamers. Now they are incarcerated in hospitals, or
languishing in the gutter.

No Pedestrian Access To Shopping Centre

Still, the mood of Savage Messiah is far from hopeless. It’s not about
caving in, it’s about different strategies for surviving the deep midwinter
of Restoration London. People living on next to nothing, no longer living
the dream, but not giving up either: ‘Five years since the last party but
he held his plot, scavenging for food like a Ballardian crash victim.’ You
can go into suspended animation, knowing that the time is not yet right,
but waiting with cold reptile patience until it is. Or you can flee
Dystopian London without ever leaving the city, avoiding the central
business district, finding friendly passages through the occupied
territory, picking your way through the city via cafes, comrade’s flats,
public parks. Savage Messiah is an inventory of such routes, such
passages through ‘territories of commerce and control’.

The zines are saturated in music culture. First of all, there are the
names of groups: Infa Riot and Blitz. Fragments of Abba, Heaven 17 on
the radio. Japan, Rudimentary Peni, Einstiirzende Neubauten, Throbbing
Gristle, Spiral Tribe. Whether the groups are sublime or sub-charity shop
undesirable, these litanies have an evocative power that is quietly
lacerating. Gig posters from 30 years ago - Mob, Poison Girls, Conflict -
call up older versions of you, half-forgotten haircuts, long-lost longings,
stirring again. But the role of music culture goes much deeper in Savage
Messiah. The way the zine is put together owes as much to the rogue
dance and drug cultures that mutated from Rave as to punk fanzines; its
montage methodology has as much in common with the DJ mix as with
any precursor in visual culture. Savage Messiah is also about the
relationship between music and place: the zine is also a testament to the

way in which the sensitive membranes of the city are reshaped by music.

This sombre place is haunted by the sounds of lost acid house parties
and the distant reverberations of 1986. Test Department. 303. 808.
Traces of industrial noise.

The roundhouse was easy to get into, and the depot itself, disused
for years is lit up with tags and dubs.

You can hear these deserted places, feel the tendrils creeping across
the abandoned caverns, the derelict bunkers and broken terraces. Mid
summer, blistering heat under the concrete, Armagideon Time(s), a
hidden garden, to be found, and lost again.

Superficially, the obvious tag for Savage Messiah would be
psychogeography, but the label makes Ford chafe. ‘I think a lot of what
is called psychogeography now is just middle-class men acting like
colonial explorers, showing us their discoveries and guarding their plot. I
have spent the last twenty years walking around London and living here
in a precarious fashion, I’ve had about fifty addresses. I think my
understanding and negotiation of the city is very different to theirs.’
Rather than subsuming Savage Messiah under the increasingly played-out
discourses of psychogeography, I believe it is better understood as an
example of a cultural coalescence that started to become visible (and
audible) at the moment when Ford began to produce the zine:
hauntology. ‘The London I conjure up...is imbued with a sense of
mourning,’ Ford says. ‘These are the liminal zones where the free party
rave scene once illuminated the bleak swathes of marshland and
industrial estates.’ So many dreams of collectivity have died in neoliberal
London. A new kind of human being was supposed to live here, but that
all had to be cleared away so that the restoration could begin.

Haunting is about a staining of place with particularly intense
moments of time, and, like David Peace, with whom her work shares a
number of affinities, Ford is alive to the poetry of dates. 1979, 1981,
2013: these years recur throughout Savage Messiah, moments of
transition and threshold, moments when a whole alternative time-track
opens. 2013 has a post-apocalyptic quality (in addition to being the year
of the London Olympics, 2012 is also, according to some, the year that

the Mayans predicted for the end of the world). But 2013 could also be
Year Zero: the reversal of 1979, the time when all the cheated hopes and
missed chances are finally realised. Savage Messiah invites us to see the
contours of another world in the gaps and cracks of an occupied London:

Perhaps it is here that the space can be opened up to forge a collective
resistance to this neo liberal expansion, to the endless proliferation of
banalities and the homogenising effects of globalisation. Here in the
burnt out shopping arcades, the boarded up precincts, the lost citadels
of consumerism one might find the truth, new territories might be
opened, there might be a rupturing of this collective amnesia.

Nomadalgia: The Junior Boys’ So This is Goodbye

k-punk post, March 4, 2006

Space comes as standard with the Junior Boys. The synthpop that
inspired them remained attached, for the most part, to the three-minute
format; ‘extended’ remixes were a concession to the imperatives of
dance. Only one of So This is Goodbye’s 10 tracks is under four minutes.
Space is integral, not only to their sound, but to their songs. Space is a
compositional component, a presupposition of the songs, not something
retrospectively inserted at a producer’s whim. The pauses, the imagist-
allusiveness of the lyrics, the breathy phrasing would not work, or make
much sense, outside a plateau-architecture imported from dance;
crushed into three minutes Junior Boys’ songs would lose more than
length.

House references are everywhere: the title track is gorgeously,
oneirically poised on a honeyed Mr Fingers’ plateau, and it is not only
the arpeggiated synth which drives many of the tracks that is
reminiscent of Jamie Principle. Yet the LP does not sound either like
House or like most previous attempts to synthesize pop with House. So
This is Goodbye is like House if it had started in the wilds of Canada
rather the clubs of Chicago. Too many House-pop hybrids fill up House’s
space with business, hectic activity. On Vocalcity and, to some extent The
Present Lover, Luomo did the opposite: dilating the Song into an
unfolding driftwork. But the Luomo LPs were more pop House than pop
per se. So This is Goodbye is, however, very definitely a pop record; if
anything, it’s even more seductively catchy than Last Exit.

The obvious difference between So This is Goodbye and its predecessor
is the absence of the tricksy stop-start stutter beats on the new record. If
Junior Boys’ inventiveness is no longer concentrated on beats, that is a
reflection as much of a decline of the surrounding pop context as it a
sign of the JB’s newfound taste for rhythmic classicism. Last Exit’s
reworkings of Timbaland/Dem 2 tic-beats meant that it had a

relationship with a rhythmic psychedelia that was, then, still mutating
pop into new shapes. In the intervening period, of course, both hip hop
and British garage have taken a turn for the brutalist, and pop has
consequently been deprived of any modernising force. Timbaland’s beat
surrealism became water-treading repetition years ago, displaced by the
ultra-realist thuggish plod of corporate hip hop and the ugly carnality of
crunk; and 2 Step’s ‘feminine pressure’ has long since been crushed by
the testos-terone-saturated bluntness of Grime and Dubstep. That skunk-
fugged heaviness remains the antipodes of the Junior Boys’ cyberian,
etherealised, plaintive physicality; listening to the Junior Boys after
Grime or Dubstep is like walking out of a locker room thick with dope
smoke out onto a Caspar David Friedrich mountain. A lung-cleansing
experience. (Significant also that those other ultra-heterosexual post-
Garage musics should have bred out the influence of House, while the
Junior Boys return to it so emphatically.)

But the removal of rhythmic tricksiness perhaps also indicates
something of the scale of the Junior Boys’ pop ambitions, which are best
seen as the pioneering of a New MOR rather than another attempt at
New Pop. If there is no cutting edge, then it makes more sense to
abandon the former margins and refurbish the middle of the road. The
Junior Boys’ songs have always had more in common with a certain type
of modernist MOR - Hall and Oates, Prefab Sprout, Blue Nile, Lindsay
Buckingham - than with any rock. Modernist MOR is the opposite of the
discredited strategy of entryism: it doesn’t ‘conform to deform’, it locates
the alien right in the heart of the familiar. The problem with current Pop
is not the predominance of MOR, but the fact that MOR has been
corrupted by the wheedling whine of Indie authenticity. In any just
world, the Junior Boys, not the drippy moroseness of James Blunt nor
the earthy earnestness of KT Tunstall, would be the globally dominant
MOR brand in 2006.

Ultimately, though, So This is Goodbye sounds more middle of the
tundra than middle of the road. It’s as if the Junior Boys’ journey into
North America Endless has continued beyond the late-night freeways of
Last Exit. It’s like the first LP’s city lights and Edward Hopper coffee bars
have receded, and we’re taken out, beyond even the small towns, into
the depopulated wildernesses of Canada’s Northern Territories. Or
rather, it’s as if those wildernesses have crept into the very marrow of

the record. In The Idea of North, Glenn Gould suggests that the North’s
icy desolation has a special pull on the Canadian imagination. You hear
this on So This is Goodbye not in any positive content so much as in the
songs’ gaps and absences; the gaps and absences that make the song
what they are.

Those crevices and grottoes seem to multiply as the album progresses.
The second half of the album (what I hear as the ‘second side’; one of the
most gratifying things about So This is Goodbye is that it is structured like
a classic pop album, not an extras-clogged CD) diffuses forward motion
into trails of electro-cumulae. The title track sets stately synths against
the anticlimactic urgency of Acid House’s Forever Now: the effect like
running up a down escalator, frozen in an aching moment of transition.
‘Like a child’ and ‘Caught in a Wave’ immerse the agitated drive of the
LP’s signature arpeggiated synth in a vapour trail of opiated
atmospherics.

The reading of Sinatra’s ‘When No-one Cares’ is the knot which holds
together all of So This is Goodbye, a clue to its modernist MOR intentions
(lines from the song - ‘count souvenirs’, ‘like a child’ - provide the titles
for other tracks, almost as if the song is a puzzle the whole album is
trying to solve). So This is Goodbye’s songs bear much the same relation
to high-energy as the late Sinatra’s bore to big band jazz: what was once
a communal, dance-oriented music has been hollowed out into a
cavernous, contemplative space for the most solitary of musings. On the
Junior Boys’ ‘When No-one Cares’ beats are abandoned altogether, the
track’s ‘endless night’ lit only by the dying-star flares and stalactite-by¬
flashlight pulse of reverbed electronics.

The Junior Boys have transformed the song from the lonely-crowd
melancholy of the original - Frank at the bar staring into his whisky
sour, happy couples partying obliviously behind him (or in his
imagination) - into a lament whispered in the wilderness, icy-breathed
into the black mirror indifference of a Great Lake at midnight. It is as
cosmically desolated as the Young Gods’ version of ‘September Song’, as
arctic-white as Miles Davis’ Aura. ‘When No-one Cares’ is one of my
favourite Sinatra songs, and I must have first heard it 20 years ago, but
with the Junior Boys’ version - which makes the catatonic stasis of the
original’s grief seem positively busy - it is as if I am hearing the words
for the first time.

Sinatra’s No-One Cares (which could have been subtitled: From
Penthouse to Satis House) was like pop’s take on literary modernism, an
affect (rather than a concept) album, a series of takes on a particular
theme - disconnection from a hyper-connected world - with Frank the
ageing sophisticate adrift in the McLuhan wasteland of the late 50s, Elvis
already here, the Beatles on the way (who is the ‘no-one’ who doesn’t
care if not the teen audience who have found new objects of adoration?),
the telephone and the television offering only new ways to be lonely. So
This is Goodbye is like a globalised update of No-One Cares, its images of
‘hotel lobbies’, ‘shopping malls we’ll never see again’ and ‘homes for
sale’ sketching a world in a state of permanent impermance (should we
say precarity?). The songs are overwhelmingly preoccupied with leave-
taking and change, fixated on doing things for the first or the last time.
‘So This is Goodbye’ is not the title track for nothing.

Sinatra’s melancholy was the melancholy of mass (old) media
technology - the ‘extimacy’ of the records facilitated by the phonograph
and the microphone, and expressing a peculiarly cosmopolitan and
urban sadness. ‘I’ve flown around the world in plane/ designed the latest
IBM brain/ but lately I’m so downhearted’, Sinatra song on No-One
Cares’ ‘I Can’t Get Started’. Jetsetting is now not the privilege of the elite
so much as a veritiginous mundanity for a permanently dispossessed
global workforce. Every town has become the ‘tourist town’ alluded to in
So This is Goodbye’s final track, ‘FM’, because now at home everyone is a
tourist, both in the sense of permanently on the move but also in the
sense of having the world at their fingertips, via the net. If Sinatra’s best
records, like Hopper’s paintings, were about the way in which the urban
experience produces new forms of isolation (and also: that such mass
mediated private moments are the only mode of affective connection in
a fragmented world), then So this is Goodbye is a response to the
cyberspatial commonplace that, with the net, even the most remote spot
can be connected up (and also: that such connection often amounts to a
communion of lonely souls). Hence the impression that, if Sinatra’s
‘When No-one Cars’ was an unanswered call from the heartless heart of
the Big Apple, then the Junior Boys’ version has been phoned-in down a
digital line from the edge of Lake Ontario. (Is it accidental that the term
‘cyberspace’ was invented by a Canadian?)

So this is Goodbye is a very travel sick record. It expresses what we

might call nomadalgia. Nomadalgia, the sickness of travel, would be a
complement to, not the opposite of, the sickness for home, nostalgia.
(And what of the relation between nomadalgia and hauntology?) It’s
entirely fitting that the final track, ‘FM’, should invoke both ‘a return
home’ and radio (not the only reference to that ghost-medium on the
album), since internet radio - with local stations available from any
hotel in the world - is perhaps more than anything else the objective
correlative of our current condition. A condition in which, as Zizek so
aptly puts it, ‘global harmony and solipsism strangely coincide. That is to
say, does not our immersion in cyberspace go hand in hand with our
reduction to a Leibnizian monad which, although “without windows”
that would directly open up to external reality, mirrors in itself the
entire universe? Are we not more and more monads, interacting alone
with the PC screen, encountering only the virtual simulacra, and yet
immersed more than ever in the global network, synchronously
communicating with the entire globe?’ (‘No Sex Please, We Are Post¬
humans’, http://www.egs.edu/faculty/slavoj-zizek/articles/no-sex-
please-we-are-post-humans/)

Grey Area: Chris Petit’s Content

BFI/ Sight & Sound Website, March 2010

At one point in Chris Petit’s haunting new film Content, we drive through
Felixstowe container port. It was an uncanny moment for me, since
Felixstowe is only a couple of miles from where I now live - what Petit
filmed could have been shot from our car window. What made it all the
more uncanny was the fact that Petit never mentions that he is in
Felixstowe; the hangars and looming cranes are so generic that I began
to wonder if this might not be a doppelganger container port somewhere
else in the world. All of this somehow underlined the way Petit’s text
describes these ‘blind buildings’ while his camera tracks along them:
‘non-places’, ‘prosaic sheds’, ‘the first buildings of a new age’ which
render ‘architecture redundant’.

Content could be classified as an essay film, but it’s less essayistic than
aphoristic. This isn’t to say that it’s disconnected or incoherent: Petit
himself has called Content a ‘21st-century road movie, ambient’, and its
reflections on ageing and parenthood, terrorism and new media are
woven into a consistency that’s non-linear, but certainly not
fragmentary.

Content is about ‘correspondence’, in different senses of the word. It
was in part generated by electronic correspondence between Petit and
his two major collaborators: Ian Penman (whose text is voiced by the
German actor Hanns Zischler) and the German musician Antye Greie.
Penman’s text is a series of reflections on the subject of email, that
‘anonymous yet intimate’ ethereal communication. Some of Penman’s
disquisitions on email are accompanied by images of postcards - the
poignant tactility of this obsolete form of correspondence all the more
affecting because the senders and addressees are now forgotten. Greie,
meanwhile, produces skeins of electronica that provide Content with a
kind of sonic unconscious in which terms and concepts referred to in the
images and the voice track are refracted, extrapolated and

supplemented.

One of the first phrases cited in Greie’s soundwork - which resembles
sketches for unrealised songs - is a quotation from Roy Batty’s famous
speech in Blade Runner: ‘If only you could see what I have seen with
your eyes.’ This is a phrase Penman has made much of in his own
writings on recording, technology and haunting - and it brings us to the
other meaning of ‘correspon-dence’ Content plays with: correspondences
in the sense of connections and associations. Some of these are
underscored by Petit in his dryly-poetic text; others he leaves the
viewers to make for themselves.

One of the most gratifying aspects of Content, in fact, is that by
contrast with so many contemporary television documentaries, which
neurotically hector the audience by incessantly reiterating their core
thesis, Petit trusts in the intelligence and speculative power of the
viewer. Where so much television now involves a mutual redundancy of
image and voice - the image is slaved into illustrating the text; the voice
merely glosses the image - Content is in large part about the spaces
between image and text, what is unsaid in (and about) the images.

The use of a German actor and musician and the many references to
Europe in Content reflect Petit’s childhood which, as he describes in the
film, was partly spent as a forces child in Germany. But it also reflects
Petit’s long-standing desire for some kind of reconciliation between
British culture and European modernism. Petit has described Content as
an ‘informal coda’ to his 1979 film Radio On (recently reissued on BFI
DVD). With its strong debt to European art cinema, Radio On projected a
rapprochement between British and European film that never happened
- a rapprochement anticipated in the 1970s art pop (Kraftwerk, Bowie)
used so prominently in that film. Petit imagined a British cinema that,
like that music, could assert its Europeanness not by rejecting America,
but by confidently absorbing American influences. Yet this future never
arrived.

‘Radio On, ’ Petit said in a recent interview, ‘ended with a car ‘stalled
on the edge of the future’, which we didn’t know then would be
Thatcherism.’ Ahead lay a bizarre yet banal mix of the unprecedented
and the archaic. Instead of accelerating down Kraftwerk’s autobahn, we
found ourselves, as Petit puts it in Content, ‘reversing into a tomorrow
based on a non-existent past’, as the popular modernism Radio On was

part of found itself eclipsed by a toxic-addictive confection of consumer-
driven populism, heritage kitsch, xenophobia and US corporate culture.
In this light, Content stands as a quiet but emphatic reproach to the
British cinema of the last 30 years, which in its dominant variants - drab
social realism, faux gangster, picture-book costume drama or mid-
Atlantic middle-class fantasia - has retreated from modernity. It isn’t
only the poor and the nonwhite who are edited out of Notting Hill, for
example - it’s also the Westway, west London’s Ballardian flyover, which
now stands as a relic of ‘the modern city that London never became’.

Yet Content isn’t just a requiem for the lost possibilities of the last 30
years. In its use of stunning but underused locations - the ready-made
post-Fordist science-fiction landscapes of Felixstowe container port, the
eerie Cold War terrain of nearby Orford Ness - Content demonstrates not
only what British cinema overlooks, but what it could still be.

Postmodern Antiques: Patience (After Sebald)

Sight & Soundl, April 2011

The first time I saw Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker - when it was broadcast
by Channel 4 in the early 1980s - I was immediately reminded of the
Suffolk landscapes where I had holidayed as a child. The overgrown pill
boxes, the squat Martello towers, the rusting groynes which resembled
gravestones: this all added up to a readymade science fiction scene. At
one point in Grant Gee’s Patience (After Sebald) (2011) - an essay film
inspired by W G Sebald’s novel The Rings of Saturn - theatre director
Katie Williams makes the same connection, drawing a comparison
between the demilitarised expanses of the Suffolk coast and Tarkovsky’s
Zone.

When I read Rings of Saturn, I was hoping that it would be an
exploration of these eerily numinous spaces. Yet what I found was
something rather different: a book that, it seemed to me at least,
morosely trudged through the Suffolk spaces without really looking at
them; that offered a Mittel-brow miserabilism, a stock disdain, in which
the human settlements are routinely dismissed as shabby and the
inhuman spaces are oppressive. The landscape in The Rings of Saturn
functions as a thin conceit, the places operating as triggers for a literary
ramble which reads less like a travelogue than a librarian’s listless
daydream. Instead of engaging with previous literary encounters with
the Suffolk - Henry James went on a walking tour of the county; his
namesake MR James set two of his most atmospheric ghost stories there
- Sebald tends to reach for the likes of Borges. My scepticism was fed by
the solemn cult that settled around Sebald suspiciously quickly, and
which seemed all-too-ready to admire those well-wrought sentences.
Sebald offered a rather easy difficulty, an anachronistic, antiqued model
of ‘good literature’ which acted as if many of the developments in 20th
century experimental fiction and popular culture had never happened. It
is not hard to see why a German writer would want to blank out the

middle part of the 20th century; and many of the formal anachronisms
of Sebald’s writing - its strange sense that this is the 21st century seen
through the restrained yet ornate prose of an early 20th century essayist
- perhaps arise from this desire, just as the novels themselves are about
the various, ultimately failed, ruses - conscious and unconscious - that
damaged psyches deploy to erase traumas and construct new identities.
The writer Robert Macfarlane has called Sebald a ‘postmodern
antiquarian’, and the indeterminate status of The Rings of Saturn - is it
autobiography, a novel or a travelogue? - points to a certain playfulness,
but this never emerges at the level of the book’s content. It was
necessary for Sebald to remain po-faced in order for the ‘antiquing’ to be
successful. Some of Gee’s images of Suffolk take their cue from the black
and white photographs which illustrate The Rings Of Saturn. But the
photographs were a contrivance: Sebald would photocopy them many
times until they achieved the required graininess.

Gee’s film was premiered as part of a weekend of events superbly
curated by Gareth Evans of Artevents under the rubric After Sebald: Place
and Re-Enchantment at Snape Makings, near Aldeburgh, in Suffolk. In the
end, however, Sebald’s novels fits into any discussion of place and
enchantment only very awkwardly: his work is more about displacement
and disenchantment than their opposites. In Patience (After Sebald), the
artist Tacita Dean observes that only children have a real sense of home.
Adults are always aware of the precariousness and transitoriness of their
dwelling place: none more so than Sebald, a German writer who spent
most of his life in Norfolk.

Patience (After Sebald) follows Gee’s documentaries about Radiohead
and Joy Division. The shift from rock to literature, Gee told Macfarlane,
was one that came naturally to someone whose sensibilities were formed
by the UK music culture of the 1970s. If Sebald had been writing in the
1970s, Gee claimed, he would surely have been mentioned in the NME
alongside other luminaries of avant-garde literature. Gee started reading
Sebald in 2004, after a recommendation from his friend, the novelist Jeff
Noon. The film’s somewhat gnomic title was a relic of an earlier version
of what the film would be. It now suggests the slowing of time that the
Suffolk landscape imposes, a release from urban urgencies, but it is
actually a reference to a passage in Sebald’s novel Austerlitz: ‘Austerlitz
told me that he sometimes sat here for hours, laying out these

photographs or others from his collection the wrong way up, as if
playing a game of patience, and that then one by one, he turned them
over, always with a new sense of surprise at what he saw, pushing the
pictures back and forth and over each other, arranging them in an order
depending on their family resemblances, or withdrawing them from the
game until either there was nothing left but the grey tabletop, or he felt
exhausted from the constant effort of thinking and remembering and had
to rest on the ottoman.’

Gee had originally intended to make a film about the non-places in
Sebald’s work: the hotel rooms or railway station waiting rooms in
which characters ruminate, converse or break down (Austerlitz himself
comes to a shattering revelation about his own identity in the waiting
room at Liverpool Street station). In the end, however, Gee was drawn to
the book which - osten-sibly at least - is most focused on a single
landscape.

Gee filmed practically everything himself, using a converted 16 mm
Bolex camera. He wanted something that would produce frames that
were ‘tighter than normal’, he said, ‘as if a single character is looking’.
Gee sees Patience (After Sebald) as an essay film, in the tradition of Chris
Petit’s work and Patrick Keiller’s Robinson trilogy. But when I put it to
him that Patience lacks the single voice that defines Petit or Keiller’s
essay films, Gee responded self-deprecatingly. He had tried to insert
himself into his own films, but he had always been dissatisfied with the
results: his voice didn’t sound right; his acting didn’t convince; his
writing wasn’t strong enough. In Patience, as in the Joy Division
documentary, the story is therefore told by others: Macfarlane, Dean,
Iain Sinclair, Petit, the literary critic Marina Warner and the artist
Jeremy Millar. Millar provided one of the most uncanny images in
Patience. When he lit a firework in tribute to Sebald, the smoke
unexpectedly formed a shape which resembled Sebald’s face, something
which Gee underlines in the film by animating a transition between
Millar’s photograph and an image of the novelist.

More than one of the speakers at the Towards Re-Enchantment
symposium acknowledged that they misremem-bered The Rings of Saturn.
There’s something fitting about this, of course, given that the duplicity of
memory might have been Sebald’s major theme; but my suspicion is that
misremembering of a different kind contributes to the Rings of Saturn

cult; that the book induces its readers to hallucinate a text that is not
there, but which meets their desires - for a kind of modernist travelogue,
a novel that would do justice to the Suffolk landscape - better than
Sebald’s actually novel does. Patience (After Sebald) is itself a
misremembering of The Rings of Saturn which could not help but reverse
many of the novel’s priorities and emphases. In The Rings of Saturn,
Suffolk frequently (and frustratingly) recedes from attention, as Sebald
follows his own lines of association. By contrast, the main substance of
the film consists of images of the Suffolk landscape - the heathland over
which you can walk for miles without seeing a soul, the crumbling cliffs
of the lost city of Dunwich, the enigma of Orford Ness, its inscrutable
pagodas silently presiding over Cold War military experiments which
remain secret. Sebald’s reflections, voiced in Patience by Jonathan Pryce,
anchor these images far less securely than they do in the novel. At
Snape, some of those who had re-created Sebald’s walk - including Gee
himself - confessed that they had failed to attain the author’s lugubrious
mood: the landscape turned out to be too energising, its sublime
desolation proving to be fallow ground for gloomy psychological
interiority. In a conversation with Robert Macfarlane after the screening
of the film, Gee said that it was not really necessary that Sebald had
taken the walk. He meant that it was not important whether or not
Sebald actually did the walk exactly as The Rings of Saturn’s narrator
described it, in one go: that the novel could have been based on a
number of different walks which took place over a longer period of time.
But I couldn’t help but hear Gee’s remark in a different way: that it was
not necessary for Sebald to have taken the walk at all: that, far from
being a close engagement with the Suffolk terrain, The Rings of Saturn
could have been written had Sebald never set foot in Suffolk.

This was the view of Richard Mabey, cast in the role of doubting
Thomas at the Towards Re-Enchantment symposium. Mabey - who has
written and broadcast about nature for 40 years, and whose latest book
Weeds has the glorious subtitle How Vagabond Plants Gatecrashed
Civilisation and Changed the Way We Think About Nature - argued that
Sebald was guilty of the pathetic fallacy. When he read The Rings Of
Saturn, Mabey said, he felt as if a very close friend had been belittled;
although he had walked the Suffolk coastland countless times, he
couldn’t recognise it from Sebald’s descriptions. But perhaps the issue

with Sebald is that he wasn’t guilty enough of the pathetic fallacy, that
instead of staining the landscape with his passions, as Thomas Hardy did
with Wessex, or the Brontes did with Yorkshire, or, more recently, as the
musician Richard Skelton has done with the Lancashire moorland -
Sebald used Suffolk as a kind of Rorschach blot, a trigger for associative
processes that take flight from the landscape rather than take root in it.
In any case, Mabey wanted a confrontation with nature in all its
inhuman exteriority. He sounded like a Deleuzean philosopher when he
expostulated about the ‘nested heterogeneity’ and ‘autonomous poetry’
of micro-ecosytems to be found in a cow’s hoof print; of how it was
necessary to ‘think like a mountain’, and quoted approvingly Virginia
Woolf’s evocation of a ‘philosophising and dreaming land’. I was struck
by the parallels between Mabey’s account of nature and Patrick Keiller’s
invocation of lichen as ‘a non-human intelligence’ in Robinson in Ruins.
With its examination of the ‘undiscovered country of nearby’, Robert
Macfarlane’s film for the BBC, The Wild Places of Essex, shown as part of
the Towards Re-Enchantment symposium, was also close to Mabey’s
vision of a nature thriving in the spaces abandoned by, or inhospitable
to, humans. (Macfarlane’s film now seems like a counterpart to Julien
Temple’s wonderful Oil City Confidential, which rooted Dr Feelgood’s
febrile rhythm and blues in the lunar landscape of Essex’s Canvey
Island.) Patience (After Sebald) could appeal to a Sebald sceptic like me
because - in spite of Sebald - it reaches the wilds of Suffolk. At the same
time, Gee’s quietly powerful film caused me to doubt my own
scepticism, sending me back to Sebald’s novels, in search of what others
had seen, but which had so far eluded me.

The Lost Unconscious: Christopher Nolan’s

Inception

Film Quarterly, Vol 64, No. 3, 2011

In Christopher Nolan’s breakthrough memory-loss thriller Memento from
2000, the traumatised and heavily tattooed protagonist Lenny has a
suggestive conversation with a detective:

TEDDY: Look at your police file. It was complete when I gave it to

you. Who took the twelve pages out?

LEONARD: You, probably.

TEDDY: No, you took them out.

LEONARD: Why would I do that?

TEDDY: To set yourself a puzzle you won’t ever solve.

Like Lenny, Christopher Nolan has specialised in setting puzzles that
can’t be solved. Duplicity - in the sense of both deception and doubling
- runs right through his work. It’s not only the case that Nolan’s work is
about duplicity; it is itself duplicitous, drawing audiences into labyrinths
of indeterminacy.

Nolan’s films have a coolly obsessive quality, in which a number of
repeating elements - a traumatised hero and his antagonist; a dead
woman; a plot involving manipulation and dissimulation - are
reshuffled. These film noir tropes are then further scrambled in the
manner of a certain kind of neo-noir. Nolan acknowledges Angel Heart
(1987) and The Usual Suspects (1995) as touchstones (he mentions both
in an interview which is included on the Memento DVD, singling out
Parker’s film as a particular inspiration), but one can also see parallels
with the meta-detective fictions of Robbe-Grillet and Paul Auster.
There’s a shift from the epistemological problems posed by unreliable
narrators to a more general ontological indeterminacy, in which the

nature of the whole fictional world is put into doubt.

Memento remains emblematic in this respect. At first glance, the film’s
enigma resolves relatively simply. Lenny, who suffers from anterograde
amnesiac condition which means that he can’t make new memories, is
‘setting puzzles for himself that can’t be solved’ so that he can always be
pursuing his wife’s murderer, long after Lenny has killed him. But after
repeated viewings, the critic Andy Klein - in a piece for Salon.com
pointedly entitled ‘Everything You Wanted To Know About Memento-
conceded that he wasn’t ‘able to come up with the ‘truth’ about what
transpired prior to the film’s action. Every explanation seems to involve
some breach of the apparent ‘rules’ of Leonard’s disability - not merely
the rules as he explains them, but the rules as we witness them operating
throughout most of the film.) The rules are crucial to Nolan’s method. If
Memento is a kind of impossible object, then its impossibility is
generated not via an anything-goes ontological anarchy but by the
setting up of rules which it violates in particular ways - just as the effect
of Escher’s paintings depend upon unsettling rather than ignoring the
rules of perspective.

Nolan nevertheless maintains that, however intractable his films might
appear, they are always based on a definitive truth which he knows but
will not reveal. As he said of Inception in the interview with Wired, ‘I’ve
always believed that if you make a film with ambiguity, it needs to be
based on a true interpretation. If it’s not, then it will contradict itself, or
it will be somehow insubstantial and end up making the audience feel
cheated. Ambiguity has to come from the inability of the character to
know - and the alignment of the audience with that character’. When
the interviewer Robert Capps puts it to Nolan that there might be several
explanations of the film’s ending, that the ‘right answer’ is impossible to
find, the director flatly contradicts him: ‘Oh no, I’ve got an answer.’ But
Nolan’s remarks may only be another act of misdirection; and, if a
century of cultural theory has taught us anything, it is that an author’s
supposed intentions can only ever constitute a supplementary (para)text,
never a final word. What are Nolan’s films about, after all, but the
instability of any master position? They are full of moments in which the
manipulator - the one who looks, writes or narrates - becomes the
manipulated - the object of the gaze, the character in a story written or
told by someone else.

In Inception, Cobb is an ‘extractor’, an expert at a special kind of
industrial espionage, which involves entering into people’s dreams and
stealing their secrets. He and his team have been hired by hyper-wealthy
businessman Saito to infiltrate the dreams of Robert Fischer, the heir to
a massive energy conglomerate. But this time Cobb’s team is not
required to extract information, but to do something which the film tells
is much more difficult: they are tasked with implanting an idea into
Fischer’s mind. Cobb’s effectiveness as a dream thief is compromised by
the projection of his dead wife, Mai, the pathological stain he now
brings with him into any dream caper. Mai died after she suffered an
apparent psychotic break. She and Cobb set up a lover’s retreat in the
‘unconstructed dreamspace’ that the dream thieves call Limbo. But after
she became too attached to this virtual love nest, Cobb ‘incepted’ in her
the idea that the world in which they were living was not real. As Cobb
mordantly observes, there is nothing more resilient than an idea. Even
when she is restored to what Cobb takes to be reality, Mai remains
obsessed with the idea that she the world around her is not real, so she
throws herself from a hotel window in order to return to what she
believes is the real world. The film turns on how Cobb deals with this
traumatic event - in order to incept Fischer, Cobb has first of all to
descend into Limbo and defeat Mai. He achieves this by simultaneously
accepting his part in Mai’s death and by repudiating the Mai projection
as an inadequate copy of his dead wife. With the Mai projection
vanquished and the dream-heist successfully completed, Cobb is finally
able to return to the children from whom he has been separated. Yet this
ending has more than a suggestion of wish fulfilment fantasy about it,
and the suspicion that Cobb might be marooned somewhere in a multi¬
layered oneirc labyrinth, a psychotic who has mistaken dreams for
reality, makes Inception deeply ambiguous. Nolan’s own remarks have
carefully maintained the ambiguity.’ I choose to believe that Cobb gets
back to his kids,’ Nolan told Robert Capps.

Nolan’s films are preoccupied with, to paraphrase Memento’s Teddy,
‘the lies that we tell ourselves to stay happy’. Yet the situation is worse
even than that. It’s one thing to lie to oneself; it’s another to not even
know whether one is lying to oneself or not. This might be the case with
Cobb in Inception, and it’s notable that, in the Wired interview, Nolan
says that ‘The most important emotional thing about the top spinning at

the end is that Cobb is not looking at it. He doesn’t care.’ Not caring
whether we are lying to ourselves may be the price for happiness - or at
least the price one pays for release from excruciating mental anguish. In
this respect, Dormer in Insomnia (2002) could be the anti-Cobb. His
inability to sleep - which naturally also means an inability to dream -
correlates with the breakdown of his capacity to tell himself a
comforting story about who he is. After the shooting of his partner,
Dormer’s identity collapses into a terrifying epistemological void, a black
box that cannot be opened. He simply doesn’t know whether or not he
intended to kill his partner (just as Borden in The Prestige cannot
remember which knot he tied on the night that Angier’s wife died in a
bungled escapology act.) But in Nolan’s worlds, it is not only that we
deceive ourselves; it is also that we are deceived about having a self.
There is no separating identity from fiction. In Memento, Lenny literally
writes (on) himself, but the very fact that he can write a script for future
versions of himself is a horrifying demonstration of his lack of any
coherent identity - a revelation that his Sisyphian quest both exemplifies
and is in flight from. Inception leaves us with the possibility that Cobb’s
quest and apparent rediscovery of his children could be a version of the
same kind of loop: a Purgatorio to Memento’s Inferno.

‘The urge to rewrite ourselves as real-seeming fictions is present in us
all,’ writes Christopher Priest in his novel The Glamour. It’s not at all
surprising that Nolan has adapted a novel by Priest, since there are
striking parallels between the two men’s methods and interests. Priest’s
novels are also ‘puzzles that can’t be solved’, in which writing, biography
and psychosis slide into one another, posing troubling ontological
questions about memory, identity and fiction. The idea of minds as
datascapes which can be infiltrated inevitably puts one in mind of the
‘consensual hallucination’ of Gibson’s cyberspace, but the dreamsharing
concept can be traced back to Priest and his extraordinary 1977 novel, A
Dream of Wessex. In Priest’s novel, a group of researcher-volunteers use a
‘dream projector’ to enter into a shared dream of a (then) future
England. Like the dreamsharing addicts we briefly glimpse in one of
Inception’s most suggestive scenes, some of the characters in A Dream of
Wessex inevitably prefer the simulated environment to the real world,
and, unlike Cobb, they choose to stay there. The differences in the way
that the concept of shared dreaming is handled in 1977 and 2010 tell us

a great deal about the contrasts between social democracy and
neoliberalism. While Inception’s dreamsharing technology is - like the
internet - a military invention turned into a commercial application,
Priest’s shared dream project is government-run. The Wessex dream
world is lyrical and languid, still part of the hazy afterglow of 60s
psychedelia. It’s all a far cry from Inception’s noise and fury, the mind as
a militarised zone.

Inception (not entirely satisfactorily) synthesizes the intellectual and
metaphysical puzzles of Memento and The Prestige (2006) with the big
budget ballistics of Batman Begins (2005) and The Dark Knight (2008).
The problem is the prolonged action sequences, which come off as
perfunctory at best. At points, it as if Inception’s achievement is to have
provided a baroquely sophisticated motivation for some very dumb
action sequences. An unkind viewer might think that the entirety of
Inception’s complex ontological structure had been constructed to justify
cliches of action cinema - such as the ludicrous amount of things that
characters can do in the time that it takes for a van to fall from a bridge
into a river. Blogger Carl Neville complains that Inception amounts to
‘three uninvolving action movies playing out simultaneously’ ‘What
could have been a fascinatingly vertiginous trip into successively
fantastic, impossible worlds, not to mention the limbo of the raw
unconscious into which a couple of the central characters plunge,’
Neville argues,

ends up looking wholly like a series of action movies, one within the
other: “reality” looks and feels like a “globalisation” movie, jumping
from Tokyo to Paris to Mombasa to Sydney with a team of basically
decent technical geniuses who are forced to live outside the law,
making sure there are lots of helicopter shots of cityscapes and exotic
local colour. Level one dream is basically The Bourne Identity... rainy,
grey, urban. Level two is the Matrix, zero gravity fistfights in a
modernist hotel, level three, depressingly, turns out to be a 70s Bond
film while the raw Id is basically just a collapsing cityscape.

The ‘level three’ snow scenes at least resemble one of the most visually
striking Bond films - 1969’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service - but it’s hard

not to share Neville’s sense of anti-climax. Rather than picking up pace
and ramping up the metaphysical complexity, the film rushes towards its
disappointing denouement. The elaborate set-up involving the ‘dream
architect’ Ariadne is summarily abandoned, as she is told to forget the
labyrinth and ‘find the most direct route through.’ When Ariadne and the
film accede to these demands, it as if the imperatives of the action
thriller have crashed through the intricacies of Nolan’s puzzle narrative
with all the subtlety of the freight train that erupts into the cityscape in
an earlier scene.

Neville is right that Inception is very far from being a ‘fascinat-ingly
vertiginous trip into successively fantastic, impossible worlds’, but it is
worth thinking about why Nolan showed such restraint. (His parsimony
couldn’t contrast more starkly with the stylistic extravagances of
something like Peter Jackson’s The Lovely Bones (2009), which aims at
the fantastic and the impossible, but ends up CGI-onanistic rather than
lyrically oneiric.) One initially strange thing about Inception is how un¬
dreamlike the dreams in the film are. It’s tempting to see the Nolan of
Inception as a reverse Hitchcock - where Hitchcock took De Chirico-like
dream topographies and remotivated them as thriller spaces, Nolan takes
standard action flick sequences and repackages them as dreams. Except
in a scene where the walls seem to close in around Cobb when he is
being pursued - which, interestingly, takes place in the film’s apparent
‘reality’ - the spatial distortions at work in Inception do not resemble the
ways in which dreams distend or collapse space. There are none of the
bizarre adjacencies or distances that do not diminish that we see in
Welles’s The Trial (1962), a film which, perhaps better than any other,
captures the uncanny topographies of the anxiety dream. When, in one
of Inception’s most remarked upon scenes, Ariadne causes the Paris
cityspace to fold up around herself and Cobb, she is behaving more like
the CGI engineer who is creating the scene than any dreamer. This is a
display of technical prowess, devoid of any charge of the uncanny. The
Limbo scenes, meanwhile, are like an inverted version of Fredric
Jameson’s ‘surrealism without the unconscious’: this is an unconscious
without surrealism. The world that Cobb and Mai ‘create’ out of their
memories is like a Powerpoint presentation of a love affair rendered as
some walk-through simulation: faintly haunting in its very lack of allure,
quietly horrifying in its solipsistic emptiness. Where the unconscious

was, there CGI shall be.

In an influential blog post, Devin Faraci argues that the whole film is a
metaphor for cinematic production itself: Cobb is the director, Arthur
the producer, Ariadne the screenwriter, Saito ‘the big corporate suit who
fancies himself a part of the game’, Fischer the audience. ‘Cobb, as a
director, takes Fischer through an engaging, stimulating and exciting
journey,’ Faraci argues, ‘one that leads him to an understanding about
himself. Cobb is the big time movie director...who brings the action,
who brings the spectacle, but who also brings the meaning and the
humanity and the emotion.’ In fact, as a director Cobb is something of a
mediocrity (who we must conclude is far less accomplished than Nolan)
- as Neville argues, Fischer’s ‘journey’ takes him through a series of
standard-issue action set pieces, which are ‘engaging, stimulating and
exciting’ only in some weakly generic way. Significantly and
symptomatically, Faraci’s hyperbole here sounds as if it might belong in
a marketing pitch for Cobb and his team; just as when Cobb and the
others eulogise the ‘creativity’ of the dream architecture process - you
can create worlds that never existed! - they sound like they are reciting
advertising copy or the script from a corporate video. The scenes in
which the team prepare for Fischer’s inception might have been
designed to bring out the depressing vacuousness of the concept of the
‘creative industries’. They play like a marketing team’s own fantasies
about what they themselves are doing: the view from inside an
Apprentice contestant’s head, perhaps. In any case, Inception seems to be
less a meta-meditation on the power of cinema than a reflection of the
way in which cinematic techniques have become imbricated into a banal
spectacle which - fusing business machismo, entertainment protocols
and breathless hype - enjoys an unprecedented dominion over our
working lives and our dreaming minds.

It is no doubt this sense of pervasive mediation, of generalised
simulation, that tempts Faraci into claiming that ‘Inception is a dream to
the point where even the dream-sharing stuff is a dream. Dom Cobb isn’t
an extractor. He can’t go into other people’s dreams. He isn’t on the run
from the Cobol Corporation. At one point he tells himself this, through
the voice of Mai, who is a projection of his own subconscious. She asks
him how real he thinks his world is, where he’s being chased across the
globe by faceless corporate goons.’ The moment when Mai confronts

Cobb with all this is reminiscent of the scene in Verhoeven’s Total Recall
(1990) when a psychiatrist attempts to persuade Arnold
Schwarzenegger’s Quaid that he is having a psychotic breakdown. But
while Total Recall presents us with a strong distinction between Quaid’s
quotidian identity as a construction worker and his life as a secret agent
at the centre of an interplanetary struggle - a distinction that the film
very quickly unsettles - Inception gives us only Cobb the generic hero:
handsome, dapper, yet troubled. If, as Faraci claims, Cobb isn’t an
extractor and he isn’t on the run from faceless corporate goons, then
who is he? The ‘real’ Cobb would then be an unrepresented X, outside
the film’s reality labyrinth - the empty figure who identifies with (and
as) Cobb the commercially-constructed fiction; ourselves, in other words,
insofar as we are successfully interpellated by the film.

This leads to another difference between Inception and its Philip K
Dick-inspired 80s and 90s precursors such as Total Recall, Videodrome
(1983) and Existenz (1999). There is very little of the ‘reality bleed’, the
confusion of ontological hierarchy, that defined those films: throughout
Inception, it is surprisingly easy for both the audience and the characters
to remember where they are in the film’s ontological architecture. When
Ariadne is being trained by Cobb’s partner, Arthur, she is taken round a
virtual model of the impossible Penrose Steps. On the face of it,
however, Inception is remarkable for its seeming failure to explore any
paradoxical Escheresque topologies. The four different reality levels
remain distinct, just as the causality between them remains well-formed.
But this apparently stable hierarchy might be violated by the object
upon which much of the discussion of the film’s ending has centred: the
thimble, the ‘totem’ that Cobb ostensibly uses to determine whether he is
in waking reality or not. If it spins without falling, then he is in a dream.
If it falls, then he is not. Many have noted the inadequacy of this
supposed proof. At best, it can only establish that Cobb is not in his
‘own’ dream, for what is there to stop his dreaming mind simulating the
properties of the real thimble? Besides, in the film’s chronology, the
thimble - that ostensible token of the empirical actual - first of all
appears as a virtual object, secreted by Mai inside a doll’s house in
Limbo. And a totem, it should be remembered, is an object of faith (it’s
worth noting in passing that there are many references to faith
throughout the film).

The association of the thimble with Mai - there are online debates as
to whether the thimble was first of all Cobb’s or Mai’s - is suggestive.
Both Mai and the thimble represent competing versions of the Real. For
Cobb, the thimble stands in for the Anglo-Saxon empiricist tradition’s
account of what reality is - something sensible, tangible. Mai, by
contrast, represents a psychoanalytic Real - a trauma that disrupts any
attempt to maintain a stable sense of reality; that which the subject
cannot help bringing with him no matter where he goes. (Mai’s
malevolent, indestructible persistence recalls the sad resilience of the
projections which haunt the occupants of the space station in
Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972).) No matter what ‘reality level’ Cobb is on,
Mai and the thimble are always there. But where the thimble supposedly
‘belongs’ to the ‘highest’ reality level, Mai ‘belongs’ to the ‘lowest’ level,
the lover’s limbo which Cobb repudiated.

Mai conflates two roles that had been kept separate in Nolan’s films -
the antagonist-double and the grief object. In Nolan’s debut, Following
(1998), the antagonist-double of the unnamed protagonist is the thief
who shares his name with Inception’s hero. The theme of the antagonist-
double is nowhere more apparent than in Nolan’s remake of Insomnia
and The Dark Knight, films which are in many ways about the proximity
between the ostensible hero and his beyond-good-and-evil rival. Nolan’s
adaptation of Christopher Priest’s novel, The Prestige, meanwhile, is in
effect a film in which there is a defining antagonism but no single
protagonist: by the end of the film, the illusionists Angier and Borden
are doubled in multiple ways, just as they are defined and destroyed by
their struggle with one another. More often than not, grief is the source
of these antagonistic doublings. Grief itself is a puzzle that cannot be
solved, and there’s a certain (psychic) economy in collapsing the
antagonist into the grief object, since the work of grief is not only about
mourning the lost object, it is also about struggling against the object’s
implacable refusal to let go. Yet there’s something hollow about Cobb’s
grief; on its own terms, it doesn’t convince as anything other than a
genre-required character trait. It instead to stand in for something else,
another sadness - a loss that the film points to but can’t name.

One aspect of this loss concerns the unconscious itself, and here we
might take Nolan’s script quite literally. For those with a psychoanalytic
bent, the script’s repeated references to the ‘subconscious’ - as opposed

to the unconscious - no doubt grate, but this might have been a
Freudian slip of a particularly revealing kind. The terrain that Inception
lays out is no longer that of the classical unconscious, that impersonal
factory which, Jean-Francois Lyotard says, psychoanalysis described
‘with the help of images of foreign towns or countries such as Rome or
Egypt, just like Piranesi’s Prisons or Escher’s Other Worlds’. (Lihidinal
Economy, Athlone, 1993, 164) Inception’s arcades and hotel corridors are
indeed those of a globalised capital, whose reach easily extends into the
former depths of what was once the unconscious. There is nothing alien,
no other place here, only a ‘subconscious’ recirculating deeply familiar
images mined from an ersatz psychoanalysis. So in place of the eerie
enigmas of the unconscious, we are instead offered an Oedipal-lite scene
played out between Robert Fischer and a projection of his dead father.
The off-the-shelf pre-masticated quality of this encounter is entirely
lacking in any of the weird idiosyncrasies which give Freud’s case
histories their power to haunt. Cod Freudianism has long been
metabolised by an advertising-entertainment culture which is now
ubiquitous, as psychoanalysis gives way to a psychotherapeutic self-help
that is diffused through mass media. It’s possible to read Inception as a
staging of this superseding of psychoanalysis, with Cobb’s apparent
victory over the Mai projection, his talking himself around to accepting
that she is just a fantasmatic substitute for his dead wife, almost a
parody of psychotherapy’s blunt pragmatism.

The question of whether Cobb is still dreaming or not at the film’s end
is ultimately too simple. For there is also the problem of whose dream
Cobb might be in, if not his ‘own’. The old Freudian paradigm made this
a problem too, of course - but there the issue was the fact that the ego
was not master in its own house because the subject was constitutively
split by the unconscious. In Inception, the ego is still not a master in its
own house, but that is because the forces of predatory business are
everywhere. Dreams have ceased to be the spaces where private
pyschopathologies are worked through and have become the scenes
where competing corporate interests play out their banal struggles.
Inception’s ‘militarised subconscious’ converts the infernal urgencies and
languid poise of the old unconscious into panicked persecution and a
consolatory familialism: pursued at work by videogame gunmen, you
later unwind with the kids building sandcastles on a beach. This is

another reason that the dreams in Inception appear so undream-like. For,
after all, these are not ‘dreams’ in any conventional sense. The designed
virtual spaces of Inception’s dreams, with their nested ‘levels’, evidently
resemble a videogame more than they recall dreams. In the era of
neuromarketing, we are presided over by what J G Ballard called
‘fictions of every kind’, the embedded literature of branding
consultancies, advertising agencies and games manufacturers. All of
which makes one of Inception’s premisses - that it is difficult to implant
an idea in someone’s mind - strangely quaint. Isn’t ‘inception’ what so
much late capitalist cognitive labour is about?

For inception to work, Arthur and Cobb tell Saito early in the film, the
subject must believe that the implanted idea is their own. The self-help
dictums of psychotherapy - which Cobb affirms at the end of Inception -
offer invaluable assistance in this ideological operation. As Eva Illouz
argues, discussing the very conversion of psychoanalysis into self-help
that Inception dramatises, ‘if we secretly desire our misery, then the self
can be made directly responsible for alleviating it...The contemporary
Freudian legacy is, and ironically so, that we are in the full masters in
our own house, even when, or perhaps especially when, it is on fire.’
(Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism, Polity, 2007, 47)
Yet our misery, like our dreams, our cars and our refrigerators, is in fact
the work of many anonymous hands. This impersonal misery may be
what Inception is ultimately about. The ostensibly upbeat ending and all
the distracting boy-toy action cannot dispel the non-specific but
pervasive pathos that hangs over the film. It’s a sadness that arises from
the impasses of a culture in which business has closed down any
possibility of an outside - a situation that Inception exemplifies, rather
than comments on. You yearn for foreign places, but everywhere you go
looks like local colour for the film set of a commercial; you want to be
lost in Escheresque mazes, but you end up in an interminable car chase.

Handsworth Songs and the English Riots

BFI/ Sight and Sound Website, September 2011

‘I’m sure that a group of people who brought the British state to its knees
can organise themselves.’ So argued John Akomfrah, the director of the
Black Audio Film Collective’s Handsworth Songs at a screening of the film
at Tate Modern last month. The film was released in 1986, a year after
riots in Handsworth, Birmingham and Tottenham. Not surprisingly,
given that the Tate had convened the event as a consequence of the
recent uprisings in England, the question of the continuities and
discontinuities between the 80s and now hung over the whole evening,
dominating the discussion that followed the screening.

Watched - and listened to - now, Handsworth Songs seems eerily
(un)timely. The continuities between the 80s and now impose
themselves on the contemporary viewer with a breathtaking force: just
as with the recent insurrections, the events in 1985 were triggered by
police violence; and the 1985 denunciations of the riots as senseless acts
of criminality could have been made by Tory politicians yesterday. This
is why it is important to resist the casual story that things have
‘progressed’ in any simple linear fashion since Handsworth Songs was
made. Yes, the BAFC can now appear at Tate Modern in the wake of new
riots in England, something unthinkable in 1985; but, as Rob White
pointed out in the discussion at the Tate event, there is little chance now
of Handsworth Songs or its like appearing on Channel 4 now, still less
being commissioned. The assumption that brutal policing and racism
were relics of a bygone era was part of the reactionary narrativisation of
the recent riots: yes, there was politics and racism back then, but not now,
not any more... The lesson to be remembered - especially now that we are
being asked to defend abortion and oppose the death penalty again - is
that struggles are never definitively won. As the academic George Shire
pointed out in the Tate discussion, many struggles have not been lost so
much as diverted into what he called ‘the privatisation of politics’, as

former activists become hired as ‘consultants’. Shire’s remarks strikingly
echoed recent comments made by Paul Gilroy. ‘When you look at the
layer of political leaders from our communities,’ Gilroy observed, ‘the
generation who came of age during that time 30 years ago, many of
those people have accepted the logic of privatization. They’ve privatised
that movement, and they’ve sold their services as consultants and
managers and diversity trainers.’ (See http://dreamof-
safety.blogspot.com/2011/08/paul-gilroy-speaks-on-riots-august-
2011.html) This points to one major discontinuity between now and 25
years ago. In 1985, political collectivities were in the process of being
violently decomposed - this was also the year in which the Miners’
Strike ended in bitter defeat - as the neoliberal political programme
began to impose the ‘privatisation of the mind’ which is now everywhere
taken for granted. Akomfrah’s optimistic take on the current riots - that
those who rioted will come to constitute themselves as a collective agent
- suggests that we might be seeing the reversal of this psychic
privatisation.

One of many striking things about Handsworth Songs is the serene
confidence of its experimental essayism. Instead of easy didacticism, the
film offers a complex palimpsest comprising archive material,
anempathic sound design and footage shot by the Collective during and
after the riots. The Collective’s practice coolly assumed, not only that
‘black’, ‘avant garde’ and ‘politics’ could co-exist, but that they must
entail one another. Such assumptions, such confidence, were all the
more remarkable for the fact that they were so hard won: the
Collective’s Lina Gopaul remembered that the idea of a black avant-
garde was greeted with incomprehension when the BAFC began their
work. Even the sight of young black people carrying cameras provoked
bemusement: are they real? Gopaul recalled police officers asking as the
Collective filmed events in Handsworth and Broadwater Farm 25 years
ago.

At a time when reactionaries once again feel able to make racist
generalisations about ‘black culture’ in mainstream media, the
Collective’s undoing of received ideas of what ‘black’ supposedly means
remains an urgent project. In The Ghost of Songs: The Film Art of the Black
Audio Film Collective, the outstanding survey of the BAFC’s work that he
co-edited with fellow Otolith Group member Anjalika Sagar, Kodwo

Eshun argued that, for the Collective, ‘black’ ‘might be profitably
understood...as a dimension of potentiality.’ At the Tate discussion,
which he chaired, Eshun pointed to the use in Handsworth Songs of Mark
Stewart and the Maffia’s dub-refracted cut-up version of ‘Jerusalem’: the
track makes a bid for an account of Englishness from which ‘blackness’,
far from being something that can be excluded, becomes instead the only
possible fulfilment of the millenarian promise of Blake’s revolutionary
poem. The use of Stewart’s music also brings home the extent to which
Handsworth Songs belonged to a postpunk moment which was defined by
its unsettling of concepts of ‘white’ and ‘black’ culture. Trevor Mathison’s
astonishing sound design certainly draws upon dub, but its voice loops
and seething electronics are equally reminiscent of the work of Test
Department and Cabaret Voltaire. So much film and television now
deploys sound as a crude bludgeon which closes down the polyvalency
of images. Whooshing sound effects subordinate audiences to the audio
equivalent of a spectacle, while the redundant use of pop music enforces
a terroristic sentimentalism. By strong and refreshing contrast,
Mathison’s sound - which is simultaneously seductive and estranging -
liberates lyricism from personalised emotion, and frees up the potentials
of the audio from the strictures of ‘music’. Subtract the images entirely,
and Handsworth Songs can function as a gripping audio-essay.

Mathison’s sound recording equipment captured one of the most
extraordinary moments in the film, an exchange between the floor
manager and the producer of the long-defunct documentary series TV
Eye in the run-up to a special edition of the programme which was about
to be filmed in front of a Tottenham audience. The exchange reveals that
it is not possible to securely delimit ‘merely technical’ issues from
political questions. The producer’s anxieties about lighting quickly shade
into concerns about the proportion of non-whites in the audience. The
matter-of-fact tone of the discussions make this sudden peek into the
reality studio all the more disturbing - and illuminating.

The screening and the discussion at the Tate were a reminder that
‘mainstream media’ is not a monolith but a terrain. It wasn’t because of
the largesse of broadcasters that the BBC and Channel 4 became host to
popular experimentalism between the 60s and the 90s. No: this was only
possible on the basis of a struggle by forces - which were political at the
same time as they were cultural - that were content neither to remain in

the margins nor to replicate the existing form of mainstream. Handsworth
Songs is a glorious artefact of that struggle - and a call for us to resume
it.

‘Tremors of an imperceptible future’:
Patrick Keiller’s Robinson in Ruins

Sight & Sound, November 2010

In Ellis Sharp’s short story ‘The Hay Wain’, a Poll Tax rioter in 1990
takes refuge in the National Gallery and ‘notices what he has never
noticed before on biscuit tins or calendars, or plastic trays on the walls
of his aunt’s flat in Bradford, those tiny figures bending in the field
beyond.’ Constable’s supposedly timeless painting of English landscape
ceases to be a kind of pastoral screensaver and becomes what it always
really was: a snapshot of agricultural labour. Far from being some refuge
from political strife, the English landscape is the site of numerous
struggles between the forces of power and privilege and those who
sought to resist them. Sharp replaces the dominant pastoral image of the
English countryside, not with a deflated quotidian realism, but with a
different kind of lyricism, one coloured by revolt: fields and ditches
become hiding places or battlegrounds; landscapes that on the surface
seem tranquil still reverberate with the unavenged spectral rage of
murdered working class martyrs. It is not the sunlit English afternoon
that is ‘timeless’, but the ability of the agents of reaction to escape
justice. When the Poll tax rioter is clubbed by police and his blood starts
to stain Constable’s emblem of English nationhood, we’re uncomfortably
reminded of more recent episodes. ‘He was resisting arrest, right? Right
mates? (Right, Sarge.)... We used minimal force , right? ... Don’t piss
yourself and we’ll see this thing through together ; right mates?... Every one’ll
be on our side , remember that. The commissioner. The Federation. The
papers. And, if it comes to it, the Coroner. Now fucking go and call for an
ambulance. ’

Patrick Keiller’s latest film, Robinson in Ruins, the long-awaited sequel
to his two 1990s films, London (1994) and Robinson in Space (1997),
performs a similar politicisation of landscape. Or rather, it exposes the
way in which the rural landscape is always-already intensely politicised.

‘I had embarked on landscape film-making in 1981, early in the
Thatcher era, after encountering a surrealist tradition in the UK and
elsewhere, so that cinematography involved the pursuit of a
transformation, radical or otherwise, of everyday reality,’ Keiller wrote
in 2008, as he was preparing Robinson in Ruins. ‘I had forgotten that
landscape photography is often motivated by utopian or ideological
imperatives, both as a critique of the world, and to demonstrate the
possibility of creating a better one.’ London was a melancholy, quietly
angry study of the city after 13 years of Tory rule. Its unnamed narrator,
voiced by Paul Scofield, told of the obsessive researches undertaken by
Robinson, a rogue - and fictional - theorist, into the ‘problem of
London’. London was the capital of the first capitalist country, but
Keiller was interested in the way that the city was now at the heart of a
new, ‘post-Fordist’ capitalism, in which manufacturing industry had been
superseded by the spectral weightlessness of the so-called service
economy. Robinson and his narrator friend bitterly surveyed this brave
new world with the doleful eyes of men formed in a very different era: a
world in which public service broadcasters could commission films of
this nature.

London was as remarkable for the unique way that it combined fiction
with the film-essay form. The film was composed of a series of striking
images captured by Keiller’s static camera, which unblinkingly caught
the city in unguarded epiphanic moments. Robinson in Space retained the
same methodology, but broadened the focus from London to the rest of
England. Rural landscapes featured in Robinson in Space, but as
something which Keiller’s camera looked over rather than at. In the first
two films, Robinson’s interest was in the cities where capitalism was first
built, and in the non-places where it now silently spreads: the
distribution centres and container ports that are unvisited by practically
anyone except Robinson and his narrator-companion, but which web
Britain into the global market. Keiller saw that, contrary to certain
dominant narratives, the British economy was not ‘declining’. Rather,
this post-industrial economy was thriving, and that was the basis of its
oppressive and profoundly inegalitarian power.

London and Robinson in Space were made in the space between two
political non-events, the general elections of 1992 and 1997. 1992 was
the year when change was supposed to come - the end of Tory rule was

widely expected, not least by the Conservative Party itself, yet John
Major was re-elected. 1997 saw the long-anticipated change finally
arrive, but it turned out to be no kind of change at all. Far from ending
the neoliberal culture that Keiller anatomised, Tony Blair’s government
would consolidate it. Robinson in Space, largely assembled in the dying
days of the Major government, was made too early for it to properly
register this. Yet its focus on the banal, Ballardian infrastructure of
British post-Fordist capitalism made it a deeply prophetic film. The
England of Robinson in Space was still the England presided over by
Gordon Brown a decade later.

The traumatic event which reverberates through Robinson in Ruins is
the financial crisis of 2008. It’s still too early to properly assess the
implications of this crisis, but Robinson in Ruins shares with Chris Petit’s
Content - a film with which it has many preoccupations in common - the
tentative sense that a historical sequence which began in 1979 ended in
2008. The ‘ruins’ which Robinson walks through here are partly the new
ruins of a neoliberal culture that has not yet accepted its own demise,
and which, for the moment, continues with the same old gestures like a
zombie that does not know that it is dead. Citing Fredric Jameson’s
observation in The Seeds of Time that ‘it seems to be easier for us today
to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature
than the breakdown of late capitalism; perhaps that is due to some
weakness in our imaginations’, Robinson nevertheless dares to hope, if
only for a moment, that the so-called credit crunch is something more
than one of the crises by which capitalism periodically renews itself.

Perhaps strangely, it is the ‘thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth
and nature’ that seem to give Robinson some grounds for hope, and the
most evident difference between Robinson in Ruins and the previous films
is the emergence of a radical Green perspective. In part, Keiller’s turn
towards Green themes reflects changes in mainstream political culture.
At the time of the previous two Robinson films, Green politics could still
appear to be a fringe concern. In the last decade or so, however,
anxieties about global warming in particular have come into the very
centre of culture. Now, every corporation, no matter how exploitative, is
required to present itself as Green. The emergence of ecological concerns
gives Keiller’s treatment of landscape a properly dialectical poise. In the
opposition between capital and ecology, we confront what are in effect

two totalities. Keiller shows that capitalism - in principle at least -
saturates everything (especially in England, a claustrophobic country
that long ago enclosed most of its common land, there is no landscape
outside politics); there is nothing intrinsically resistant to capital’s drive
to commoditisation, certainly not in the ‘natural world’. Keiller
demonstrates this with a long excursus on how the prices of weight
increased in the immediate wake of the 2008 crisis. Yet from the equally
inhuman perspective of a radical ecology, capital, for all that it may
burn out the human environment and take large swathes of the
nonhuman world with it, is still a merely local episode.

Environmental catastrophe provides what a political unconscious
totally colonised by neoliberalism cannot: an image of life after
capitalism. Still, this life may not be a human life, and there is the
feeling that, like the narrator’s father in Margaret Atwood’s coldly
visionary novel Surfacing, Robinson may have headed off into some kind
of dark Deleuzean communion with Nature. As with Surfacing , Robinson
in Ruins begins with a disappearance: Robinson’s own. Paul Scofield
having died in 2010, the narration is no longer handled by Robinson’s
friend, but by Vanessa Redgrave, playing the head of a group seeking to
reconstruct Robinson’s thinking from notes and films recovered from the
caravan where he was last known to live. If the Redgrave narration
doesn’t quite work, then that is partly because there is a feeling that
Keiller has slightly tired of the Robinson fiction, or it has ceased to serve
much of a function for him. For what seems like large parts of the film,
the Robinson framing narrative disappears from view, to the extent that
it can be something of a jolt when Robinson is mentioned again. Lacking
Paul Scofield’s sardonic insouciance, Redgrave’s narrative is often oddly
tentative, her emphasis not quite mustering Scofield’s assured mastery of
Keiller’s tone.

In tracking the historical development of capitalism in England, and
the sites of struggle against it, Robinson in Ruins shows a sensitivity to
the way that landscape silently registers (and engenders) politics that
echoes the concerns of Daniele Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub. As in
Straub-Huillet’s films, Robinson in Ruins returns to landscapes where
antagonism and martyrdom once took place: Greenham Common, the
woodland where Professor David Kelly committed suicide.

Keiller’s decision to retain film rather than switch to a digital medium

carries more charge now than it did when he used a cine camera for
London and Robinson in Space. In many ways, even in 1997, we had yet
to really enter the digital realm; now, with cyberspace available on
every smartphone handset, we are never outside it. The return to film
made him appreciate the materiality of the medium in a new way.
‘Compared with videotape,’ Keiller has written, ‘film stock is expensive
to purchase and process, and the camera’s magazine holds only 122m of
stock, just over 4 minutes at 25fps. Film hence tends to involve a greater
commitment to an image before starting to turn the camera, and there is
pressure to stop as soon as possible, both to limit expenditure and to
avoid running out of loaded film. Results are visible only after
processing, which, in this case, was usually several days later, by which
time some subjects were no longer available and others had changed, so
as to rule out the possibility of a retake. I began to wonder why I had
never noticed these difficulties before, or whether I had simply forgotten
them. Another problem was that, with computer editing, it is no longer
usual to make a print to edit. Instead, camera rolls are transferred to
video after processing, so that the footage is never seen at its best until
the end of the production process. This hybridity of photographic and
digital media so emphasises the value of the material, mineral
characteristics of film that one begins to reimagine cinematography as a
variety of stone-carving.’

When we hear early on in the film that Robinson has made contact
with a series of ‘non-human intelligences’, we initially suspect that he
has finally succumbed to madness. Yet the ‘non-human intelligences’
turn out not to be the extra-terrestrials of a florid pulp science fiction-
inspired psychosis, but the intra-terrestrial lifeforms that an ecological
awareness reveals growing with a silent stubbornness that matches the
brute tenacity of capitalism. In one of the many slow spirals that typify
Keiller’s approach in Robinson in Ruins, the lichen that his camera lingers
on in an early shot, apparently for merely picturesque effect, will
eventually come to take centre stage in the film’s narrative. Lichen,
Robinson comes to realise, is already the dominant life-form on large
areas of the planet. Inspired by the work of American biologist Lynn
Margulis, Robinson confesses to a growing feeling of ‘biophilia’, which
Keiller seems to share. While his camera lingers tenderly on wildflowers,
the film’s verbal narrative is suspended, projecting us for a few long

moments into this world without humans. These moments, these
unnarrativised surveys of a non-human landscape, are like Keiller’s
version of the famous ‘Straubian shot’, the cut-aways to depopulated
landscapes in Straub and Huillet’s films. Robinson is drawn to Margulis
because she rejects the analogies between capitalism and the biological
that are so often used to naturalise capitalist economic relations. Instead
of the ruthless competition which social Darwinians find in nature,
Margulis discovers organisms engaging in co-operative strategies. When
Keiller turns his camera on these ‘non-human intelligences’, these mute
heralds of a future without humanity, I’m reminded of the black orchids
in Troy Kennedy Martin’s Edge Of Darkness, those harbingers of an
ecology that is readying to take revenge on a humanity that
thoughtlessly disdained it. Kennedy Martin’s inspiration was the anti¬
humanist ecology of James Lovelock, and Lovelock’s apocalyptic
message seems to haunt Robinson in Ruins too. Keiller finds extinction
looming everywhere - species dying off at a far faster rate than scientists
had thought possible only a few years ago. The emphasis on extinction
means that the concerns of Robinson in Ruins rhyme with the
preoccupations that have emerged in speculative realist philosophy,
which has focused on the spaces prior to, beyond and after human life.
In some respects, the work of philosophers such as Ray Brassier and Tim
Morton re-stages the old confrontation between human finitude and the
sublime which was the former subject of a certain kind of landscape art.
But where the older sublime concentrated on local natural phenomenon
such as the ocean or volcanic eruptions which could overwhelm and
destroy the individual organism or whole cities, speculative realism
contemplates the extinction, not only of the human world, but of life and
indeed matter itself. The prospect of ecological catastrophe means that
disjunction between the lived time of human experience and longer
durations is now not just a question of metaphysical contemplation, but
a matter of urgent political concern, as one of Robinson’s touchstones,
Fredric Jameson, noted. ‘[A]s organisms of a particular life span,’
Jameson writes in his essay ‘Actually Existing Marxism’,

we are poorly placed as biological individuals to witness the more

fundamental dynamics of history, glimpsing this or that incomplete

moment, which we hasten to translate into the alltoo-human terms of
success or failure. But neither stoic wisdom nor the reminder of a
longer-term view are really satisfactory responses to this peculiar
existential and epistemological dilemma, comparable to the science-
fictional one of beings inhabiting a cosmos they do not have organs to
perceive or identify. Perhaps only the acknowledgement of this radical
incommensurability between human existence and the dynamic of
collective history and production is capable of generating new kinds of
political attitudes; new kinds of political perception, as well as of
political patience; and new methods for decoding the age as well, and
reading the imperceptible tremors within it of an inconceivable future.
(Valences of the Dialectic, Verso, 2010, pp369-70)

Amongst its requiem for neoliberal England, Robinson in Ruins gives us
some intimations of those imperceptible tremors and inconceivable
futures.

Contemporary culture has eliminated both the concept of the public and
the figure of the intellectual. Former public spaces - both physical and
cultural - are now either derelict or colonized by advertising. A
cretinous anti-intellectualism presides, cheerled by expensively educated
hacks in the pay of multinational corporations who reassure their bored
readers that there is no need to rouse themselves from their interpassive
stupor. The informal censorship internalized and propagated by the
cultural workers of late capitalism generates a banal conformity that the
propaganda chiefs of Stalinism could only ever have dreamt of imposing.
ZerO Books knows that another kind of discourse - intellectual without
being academic, popular without being populist - is not only possible: it
is already flourishing, in the regions beyond the striplit malls of so-
called mass media and the neurotically bureaucratic halls of the
academy. ZerO is committed to the idea of publishing as a making public
of the intellectual. It is convinced that in the unthinking, blandly
consensual culture in which we live, critical and engaged theoretical
reflection is more important than ever before.